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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

136. “Never forget, the most vulnerable spot is down the middle.”

— Julian Barnes

137. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

141. “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

142. “The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is ‘success’ in mourning?”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

144. “When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world.”

— Julian Barnes

145. “Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn’t what poor items they would be.”

— Julian Barnes

146. “There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

149. “When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don’t have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.”

— Julian Barnes

150. “You only had to look at Noah and his wife, or at their three sons and their three wives, to realize what a genetically messy lot the human race would turn out to be.”

— Julian Barnes