Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

230. “For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is “success” in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both?”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

233. “There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were.”

— Julian Barnes

234. “You might even ask me to apply my ‘theory’ to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness. I’m not sure I could answer this, to be honest.”

— Julian Barnes

235. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

237. “The one thing that is very good in life today is death.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

240. “Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

244. “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

245. “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

246. “And by that time he had made the most terrifying discovery of his life, one which probably cast a shadow over all his subsequent relationships: the realization that most love, even the most ardent and the most sincere, can, given the correct assault, curdle into a mixture of pity and anger.”

— Julian Barnes

247. “I swiftly realised how grief sorts out and realigns those around the griefstruck; how friends are tested; how some pass, some fail. Old friendships may deepen through shared sorrow; or suddenly appear lightweight.”

— Julian Barnes

248. “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

249. “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

250. “I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life.”

— Julian Barnes