Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.”

— Julian Barnes

52. “Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.”

— Julian Barnes

53. “But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions – and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives – then I plead guilty.”

— Julian Barnes

54. “Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.”

— Julian Barnes

55. “All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.”

— Julian Barnes

56. “Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.”

— Julian Barnes

57. “I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.”

— Julian Barnes

58. “Everything you wanted to say required a context. If you gave the full context, people thought you a rambling old fool. If you didn’t give the context, people thought you a laconic old fool.”

— Julian Barnes

59. “The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn’t God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God’s magnanimity every time it stopped raining.”

— Julian Barnes

60. “You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people’s eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.”

— Julian Barnes

61. “Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.”

— Julian Barnes

62. “Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?”

— Julian Barnes

63. “Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.”

— Julian Barnes

64. “Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?”

— Julian Barnes

65. “He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.”

— Julian Barnes

66. “No sooner do we come into this world, than bits of us start to fall off.”

— Julian Barnes

67. “If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.”

— Julian Barnes

68. “Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense.”

— Julian Barnes

69. “Opera cuts to the chase – as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.”

— Julian Barnes

70. “Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.”

— Julian Barnes

71. “Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.”

— Julian Barnes

72. “I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another.”

— Julian Barnes

73. “Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.”

— Julian Barnes

74. “What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?”

— Julian Barnes

75. “The land of embarrassment and breakfast.”

— Julian Barnes

76. “A pier is a disappointed bridge.”

— Julian Barnes

77. “She is the centre of my world. The Armenians believed that Ararat was the centre of the world; but the mountain was divided between three great empires, and the Armenians ended up with none of it, so I shan’t continue this comparison. I love you.”

— Julian Barnes

78. “Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.”

— Julian Barnes

79. “Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don’t you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.”

— Julian Barnes

80. “Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.”

— Julian Barnes

81. “Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.”

— Julian Barnes

82. “Integrity is like virginity: once lost, never recoverable.”

— Julian Barnes

83. “Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand?”

— Julian Barnes

84. “Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well enough alone? Why aren’t the books enough?”

— Julian Barnes

85. “Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.”

— Julian Barnes

86. “This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.”

— Julian Barnes

87. “Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.”

— Julian Barnes

88. “To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.”

— Julian Barnes

89. “History is not just the lies of the victors; it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.”

— Julian Barnes

90. “Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.”

— Julian Barnes

91. “This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents – were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen.”

— Julian Barnes

92. “Life and reading are not separate activities, When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.”

— Julian Barnes

93. “In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth’s disguise was irony.”

— Julian Barnes

94. “In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.”

— Julian Barnes

95. “What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”

— Julian Barnes

96. “What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.”

— Julian Barnes

97. “And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest. We did not make the clouds come in the first place, and have no power to disperse them. All that has happened is that from somewhere – or nowhere – an unexpected breeze has sprung up, and we are in movement again.”

— Julian Barnes

98. “Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren’t. They weren’t even one of the questions.”

— Julian Barnes

99. “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”

— Julian Barnes

100. “Nor did any of them apply to Adrian. In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning: that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.”

— Julian Barnes