Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Very few of my characters are based on people I’ve known. It is too constricting.”

— Julian Barnes

252. “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

253. “At a social event she and I would normally have attended together, an acquaintance came up and said to me, simply, “There’s someone missing.” That felt correct, in both senses.”

— Julian Barnes

254. “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

255. “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

256. “Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.”

— Julian Barnes

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

261. “Medicine then must have been such an exciting, desperate, violent business; nowadays it is all pills and bureaucracy.”

— Julian Barnes

262. “I’m a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.”

— Julian Barnes

263. “The more so because, among its repetitions, it is always looking for new ways to prick you.”

— Julian Barnes

264. “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

265. “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

266. “The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself.”

— Julian Barnes

267. “Cheer up! Death is round the corner.”

— Julian Barnes

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.”

— Julian Barnes

273. “To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic.”

— Julian Barnes

274. “Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first.”

— Julian Barnes

275. “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

276. “But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.”

— Julian Barnes

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional.”

— Julian Barnes

281. “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

282. “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

283. “Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.”

— Julian Barnes

284. “Though always frank, the novelist was never wholly sincere.”

— Julian Barnes

285. “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

286. “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

287. “But if you’re very clever, I think there’s something that can unhinge you if you’re not careful.”

— Julian Barnes

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths.”

— Julian Barnes

292. “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

293. “Style is a function of theme. Style is not imposed on subject-matter, but arises from it. Style is truth to thought.”

— Julian Barnes

294. “The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading.”

— Julian Barnes

295. “The trouble was, how could you know what question to ask? It seemed to her that you were in a position to ask a really correct question only if you already knew the answer, and what was the point of that?”

— Julian Barnes

296. “And so, by the end, you have tried soft love and tough love, feelings and reason, truth and lies, promises and threats, hope and stoicism.”

— Julian Barnes

297. “And since the griefstruck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don’t, offence-giving and offence-taking are common.”

— Julian Barnes

298. “It seemed... that intelligence wasn’t as pure and unalterable a characteristic as people believed. Being intelligent was like being good: you could be virtuous in one person’s company and yet wicked in another’s. You could be intelligent with one person and stupid with another. It was partly to do with confidence... In a way she had been more confident when she had been eighteen and foolish. At twenty-three, with Michael, she felt less confident and therefore less intelligent.”

— Julian Barnes

299. “I didn’t want the day to unravel. Though looking back, it was not the day, but the four of us, that were beginning to unravel.”

— Julian Barnes

300. “You realize how sympathy and antagonism can coexist. You are discovering how many seemingly incompatible emotions can thrive, side by side, in the same human heart.”

— Julian Barnes