Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there’s powerful evidence to the contrary.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

204. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

206. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

233. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

235. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

237. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

240. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

244. “Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot onto the pitch – See, son, you press hard on one nostril to close it, and explode the green stuff out of the other. How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you before you’ve even understood what life’s about. Oh yes, I look forward to taking Lucas to the football. But.”

— Julian Barnes

245. “People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.”

— Julian Barnes

246. “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

247. “I remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history – Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

249. “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

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

— Julian Barnes