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. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

216. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

225. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— 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. “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

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

237. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

239. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

242. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

244. “The diary was evidence; it was – it might be – corroboration. It might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump-start something – though I had no idea what.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

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

— Julian Barnes