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Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2025 Update)
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Julian Barnes Quote: “Why should anything happen when everything has happened?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “I can’t do anything to you now, but time can. Time will tell. It always does.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “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 Quote: “Sleep democratizes fear. The terror of a lost shoe or a missed train are as great here as those of guerrilla attack or nuclear war.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Every day is Sunday” – that wouldn’t make a bad epitaph, would it?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “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 Quote: “Medicine then must have been such an exciting, desperate, violent business; nowadays it is all pills and bureaucracy.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “I’m a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “The more so because, among its repetitions, it is always looking for new ways to prick you.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Compliments of the season to you, and may the acid rain fall on your joint and anointed heads.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Cheer up! Death is round the corner.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “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 Quote: “And he was not angry. But, before the pain set in, he had the time to be rueful. He had laid everything out, the best of himself, and it had not been enough. He had considered himself a bohemian, but she had proved too bohemian for him. And he had failed to understand her explanation of herself.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “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 Quote: “Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “For Montaigne, the death of youth, which so often takes place unnoticed is the harder death; what we habitually refer to as ‘death’ is no more than the death of old age... The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into nonexistence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth crabbed and regretful age.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Truth to life, at the start, to be sure; yet once the process gets under way, truth to art is the greater allegiance.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “I think there’s a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away... and forgiveness descends.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for – and whose noble gesture reemphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. ‘Most lives’: my life.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “So now, contended indifference before Middlesbrough against Slovan Bratislava coexisted with a craving for an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norm.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “They didn’t want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “But if you’re very clever, I think there’s something that can unhinge you if you’re not careful.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “If asked in a court of law what happened and what was said, I could only attest to the words “heading,” “stagnating” and “peaceable.” I’d never thought of myself as peaceable – or its opposite – until then. I would also swear to the truth of the biscuit tin; it was burgundy red, with the Queen’s smiling profile on it.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “This ought to have given him a whole storetank of existential rage, but somehow it didn’t;.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “To die from ‘a draining away of one’s strength caused by extreme old age’ was in Montaigne’s day a ‘rare, singular and extraordinary death.’ Nowadays we assume it as our right.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Style is a function of theme. Style is not imposed on subject-matter, but arises from it. Style is truth to thought.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history – even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Though always frank, the novelist was never wholly sincere.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Film-makers and actors can only show a version of the act, but writers can express what people are thinking, feeling, as well as doing.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “We didn’t do anger in my family. We did ironic comment, snappy rejoinder, satirical elaboration; we did exact words forbidding a certain action, and more severe ones condemning what had already taken place. But for anything beyond this, we did the thing enjoined upon the English middle classes for generations. We internalised our rage, our anger, our contempt. We spoke words under our breath.”
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