Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Beware of dreams,” Elizabeth Finch replied. “Also, as a general rule, beware of what most people aspire to.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

204. “I love you.’ For a start, we’d better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in the bank. We shouldn’t leave them lying around the house like a tube of vitamin C. If the words come too easily to hand, we’ll use them without thought; we won’t be able to resist. Oh, we say we won’t, but we will. We’ll get drunk, or lonely, or – likeliest of all – plain damn hopeful, and there are the words gone, used up, grubbied.”

— Julian Barnes

205. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

207. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

209. “Of course, there were other sorts of literature – theoretical, self-referential, lachrymosely autobiographical – but they were just dry wanks. 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

210. “How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren’t living under Communism!”

— Julian Barnes

211. “At best you have one of those debilitating conditions which come in many forms, and which some people decline to admit actually exist.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

213. “One feeling at least grows stronger in me with each year that passes – a longing to see the cranes. At this time of year I stand on a hill and watch the sky. Today they did not come. There were only wild geese. Geese would be beautiful if cranes did not exist.”

— Julian Barnes

214. “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

215. “Music – good music, great music – had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.”

— Julian Barnes

216. “Silent or gagged women are powerless women. A powerful woman is one who can speak out to challenge existing power structures or to explore previously taboo territory.”

— Julian Barnes

217. “Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.”

— Julian Barnes

218. “He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.”

— Julian Barnes

219. “Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?”

— Julian Barnes

220. “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

221. “Isn’t there something between stagnation and heading somewhere?” “Like?” “Like having a nice time. Enjoy the day and all that?”

— Julian Barnes

222. “Perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour. We all think the one we’ve got – or haven’t got – is just about right, and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It’s everyone else who’s out of step.”

— Julian Barnes

223. “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

224. “But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they – he – had once fitted together. –.”

— Julian Barnes

225. “Those in the middle got killed; governments and terrorists survived. At.”

— Julian Barnes

226. “Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love.”

— Julian Barnes

227. “In Britain I’m sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.”

— Julian Barnes

228. “Be approximately satisfied with approximate happiness. The only thing in life which is clear and beyond doubt is unhappiness.”

— Julian Barnes

229. “How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?”

— Julian Barnes

230. “Oliver used to have a theory he called Love, etc.: in other words the world divides into people for whom love is everything and the rest of life is a mere ‘etc.,’ and people who don’t value love enough and find the most exciting part of life is the ’etc.”

— Julian Barnes

231. “And that’s a life, isn’t it? Some achievements and some disappointments.”

— Julian Barnes

232. “Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike’s readable. Hawthorne’s readable. It’s a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake,” before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.”

— Julian Barnes

233. “The ability to see and examine himself; the ability to make moral decisions and act on them; the mental and physical courage of his suicide. “He took his own life” is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands – and then out of them. How few of us – we that remain – can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories.”

— Julian Barnes

234. “Martha was a clever girl, and therefore not a believer.”

— Julian Barnes

235. “Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.”

— Julian Barnes

236. “The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.”

— Julian Barnes

237. “And I thought of a cresting wave of water, lit by a moon, rushing past and vanishing upstream, pursued by a band of yelping students whose torchbeams criss-crossed in the dark. There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.”

— Julian Barnes

238. “Jake, who is both fitter and more hedonistic than me, once told me what they say about martinis: “One’s perfect. Two’s too many. And three’s not enough.”

— Julian Barnes

239. “Every day is Sunday” – that wouldn’t make a bad epitaph, would it?”

— Julian Barnes

240. “Still, as I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the same way.”

— Julian Barnes

241. “But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person.”

— Julian Barnes

242. “In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.”

— Julian Barnes

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

243. “Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away. It was a long and wearisome process, like a toothache reaching far into the soul. But you can pull out a tooth and it will be gone. Illusions, however, even when dead, continue to rot and stink within us. We cannot escape their taste and smell. We carry them around with us all the time.”

— Julian Barnes

244. “Very few of my characters are based on people I’ve known. It is too constricting.”

— Julian Barnes

245. “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

246. “Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn’t make it any the less real. And it was the only story.”

— Julian Barnes

247. “First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years.”

— Julian Barnes

248. “The sadness of life. That was another conundrum he would occasionally ponder.”

— Julian Barnes

249. “Why should anything happen when everything has happened?”

— Julian Barnes

250. “I can’t do anything to you now, but time can. Time will tell. It always does.”

— Julian Barnes