Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.”

— Julian Barnes

103. “Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.”

— Julian Barnes

104. “We live on the flat, on the level, and yet – and so – we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.”

— Julian Barnes

105. “You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.”

— Julian Barnes

106. “Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?”

— Julian Barnes

107. “Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that – if it is not moral in its effect – then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.”

— Julian Barnes

108. “Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.”

— Julian Barnes

109. “I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.”

— Julian Barnes

110. “It’s easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren’t writers, and very little harm comes to them.”

— Julian Barnes

111. “I was too far away to observe what color Enid Starkie’s eyes were; all I remember of her is that she dressed like a matelot, walked like a scrum-half, and had an atrocious French accent.”

— Julian Barnes

112. “None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.”

— Julian Barnes

113. “Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.”

— Julian Barnes

114. “Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake.”

— Julian Barnes

115. “If you’re an old geezer in his rocker on the porch, you don’t play basketball with the kids. Old geezers don’t jump. You sit and make a virtue of what you have. And what you do is this: you make the kids think that anyone, anyone can jump, but it takes a wise old buzzard to know how to sit there and rock.”

— Julian Barnes

116. “I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”

— Julian Barnes

117. “We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way.”

— Julian Barnes

118. “I’d ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction. Well, perhaps not entirely. Coincidences would be permitted in the picaresque; that’s where they belong. Go on, take them: let.”

— Julian Barnes

119. “Love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist: that’s why bad love is still good love. It may make us unhappy, but it insists that the mechanical and the material needn’t be in charge.”

— Julian Barnes

120. “A couple’s first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.”

— Julian Barnes

121. “We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?”

— Julian Barnes

122. “And that was all the part of it – the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned paradox of it – in order to behave well, you have to behave badly.”

— Julian Barnes

123. “Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?”

— Julian Barnes

124. “Grief, like death, is banal and unique. So, a banal comparison. When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you. Before, they had been more or less invisible, and they continue to remain so to the other drivers, to the unwidowed.”

— Julian Barnes

125. “Blame someone else, that’s always your first instinct. And if you can’t blame someone else, then start claiming the problem isn’t a problem anyway. Rewrite the rules, shift the goalposts.”

— Julian Barnes

126. “If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.”

— Julian Barnes

127. “The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.”

— Julian Barnes

128. “The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.”

— Julian Barnes

129. “Heroes become traitors, traitors become martyrs.”

— Julian Barnes

130. “Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.”

— Julian Barnes

131. “But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time – love of the old school, and so on. 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

132. “It is important to understand that in the modern world we prefer the replica to the original because it gives us the greater frisson. I leave that word in French because I think you understand it well that way.”

— Julian Barnes

133. “There’s nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there’s something wrong with the young who can’t be fascinated by a genius.”

— Julian Barnes

134. “Time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent.”

— Julian Barnes

135. “As I’ve explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.”

— Julian Barnes

136. “Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism, Things contained more.”

— Julian Barnes

137. “For a woman, fidelity is a virtue; for a man, it’s hard work.”

— Julian Barnes

138. “But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort of another. And it was fine to plan an emotional strategy, but another thing when the ground opened up in front of you, and your defending troops toppled into a ravine which hadn’t been marked on the map until a few seconds previously.”

— Julian Barnes

139. “It is better to waste your old age than to do nothing at all with it.”

— Julian Barnes

140. “But life never lets you go, does it? You can’t put down life the way you put down a book.”

— Julian Barnes

141. “Honour is not just a matter of internal good feeling, but also of external behaviour.”

— Julian Barnes

142. “And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime’s internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.”

— Julian Barnes

143. “Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.”

— Julian Barnes

144. “In love, everything is both true and false; it’s the one subject on which it’s impossible to say anything absurd.”

— Julian Barnes

145. “You’re still in it. You’ll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it’s gone that deep. You’ll always be walking wounded. That’s the only choice, after a while. Walking wounded, or dead. Don’t you agree?”

— Julian Barnes

146. “It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition.”

— Julian Barnes

147. “He thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it.”

— Julian Barnes

148. “One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That.”

— Julian Barnes

149. “You realize that tough love is also tough on the lover.”

— Julian Barnes

150. “Playing Cupid, I should have you know, isn’t just a matter of flying around Arcadia and feeling your tiny winkle throb when the lovers finally kiss. It’s to do with timetables and street maps, cinema times and menus, money and organisation. You have to be both jaunty cheerleader and lithe psychiatrist. You require the binary skill of being absent when present, and present when absent.”

— Julian Barnes