Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Gradually, he didn’t doubt, the world would calm down into a gigantic welfare state devoted to sporting, cultural and sexual exchange, with the accepted international currency being items of hifi equipment.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

155. “A facetious if logical question comes into George’s mind, from where he cannot tell, unless as a reaction to all this unwonted intensity. If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?”

— Julian Barnes

156. “The orthodoxy runs, that if a marriage is founded on less than perfect truth it will always come to light. I don’t believe that. Marriage moves you further away from the examination of truth, not nearer to it.”

— Julian Barnes

157. “Look what she has lost, now that she has lost life. Her body, her spirit; her radiant curiosity about life. At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.”

— Julian Barnes

158. “Old love is a row of beach huts in November.”

— Julian Barnes

159. “I think I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.”

— Julian Barnes

160. “Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.”

— Julian Barnes

161. “His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.”

— Julian Barnes

162. “I was deeply misled by Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which seemed to insist that running naked through damp undergrowth with wild flowers entwined in your pubic hair was just about the closest thing to heaven.”

— Julian Barnes

163. “I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn’t recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.”

— Julian Barnes

164. “To own a certain book – and to choose it without help – is to define yourself.”

— Julian Barnes

165. “Sarcasm is irony which has lost its soul.”

— Julian Barnes

166. “I had a friend who trained as a lawyer, then became disenchanted and never practiced. He told me that the one benefit of those wasted years was that he no longer feared either the law or lawyers.”

— Julian Barnes

167. “When you are in your twenties, if even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.”

— Julian Barnes

168. “A question from the floor: are there tribes whose lexicon lacks the words ‘I love you’? Or have they all died out.”

— Julian Barnes

169. “Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. Did I think Adrian’s action an implied.”

— Julian Barnes

170. “Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there’s powerful evidence to the contrary.”

— Julian Barnes

171. “Real literature was about psychological, emotional, and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time.”

— Julian Barnes

172. “The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.”

— Julian Barnes

173. “Next to not living with those one loves, the worst torture is living with those one doesn’t love.”

— Julian Barnes

174. “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

175. “What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love’s favorite perversion.”

— Julian Barnes

176. “Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book – though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.”

— Julian Barnes

177. “We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient – it’s not useful – to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.”

— Julian Barnes

178. “If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.”

— Julian Barnes

179. “Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian’s fragment set off in me. There had been addition – and subtraction – in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave me a sense of unease, of unrest.”

— Julian Barnes

180. “Memory is identity. I have believed this since – oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.”

— Julian Barnes

181. “And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can’t.”

— Julian Barnes

182. “History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.”

— Julian Barnes

183. “You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not. They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves. Together, they see further, and they see more clearly.”

— Julian Barnes

184. “The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.”

— Julian Barnes

185. “I can see there might be a positive side to this wilful averting of the eye: ignoring the bad things makes it easier for you to carry on. But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns kill, that money corrupts, that snow falls in winter. Such naivety can be charming; alas, it can also be perilous.”

— Julian Barnes

186. “Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony – perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped – might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes.”

— Julian Barnes

187. “On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.”

— Julian Barnes

188. “It had all begun, very precisely, he told his mind, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, at Arkhangelsk railway station. No, his mind responded, nothing begins just like that, on a certain date at a certain place. It all began in many places, and at many times, some even before you were born, in foreign countries, and in the minds of others. –.”

— Julian Barnes

189. “I am a worm in comparison with His Excellency. I am a worm.’ ‘Yes, that’s just it, you are a worm indeed.”

— Julian Barnes

190. “And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love’s last days had come.”

— Julian Barnes

191. “History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.”

— Julian Barnes

192. “At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.”

— Julian Barnes

193. “Isn’t growing up a necessary process of losing one’s innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.”

— Julian Barnes

194. “I’m a novelist, so I can’t write about ideas unless they’re attached to people.”

— Julian Barnes

195. “There had been addition – and subtraction – in my life, but how much multiplication?”

— Julian Barnes

196. “When we fall in love, we hope – both egotistically and altruistically – that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.”

— Julian Barnes

197. “I’ve always thought you are what you are and you shouldn’t pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you’re pretending to be.”

— Julian Barnes

198. “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

199. “Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.”

— Julian Barnes

200. “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on coloured canvas, reveals himself.”

— Julian Barnes