Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old. And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

306. “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

307. “So, you see, we’re a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It’s always like that in war. That’s why it’s up to your generation now.’ But I don’t feel part.”

— Julian Barnes

308. “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

309. “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

310. “Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.”

— Julian Barnes

311. “But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.”

— Julian Barnes

312. “Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared.”

— Julian Barnes

313. “There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.”

— Julian Barnes

314. “My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it’s not pointless in terms of pleasure.”

— Julian Barnes

315. “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

316. “I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that.”

— Julian Barnes

317. “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

318. “The answers hardly seemed of consequence. Not much did. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.”

— Julian Barnes

319. “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

320. “Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards.”

— Julian Barnes

321. “The emphasis is on the lost, the abandoned, the discarded sinners, God’s detritus.”

— Julian Barnes

322. “At times, I suspect that the concept of maturity is maintained by a conspiracy of niceness.”

— Julian Barnes

323. “Truths about writing can be framed before you’ve published a word; truths about life can be framed only when it’s too late to make any difference.”

— Julian Barnes

324. “Why does anything left-wing have to be trendy before it’s read, and by the time it’s trendy it’s already a force for conservatism?”

— Julian Barnes

325. “One of my sons writes books I can read, but cannot understand, and the other writes books I can understand, but cannot read.”

— Julian Barnes

326. “The relationship between professional and domestic cook has similarities to a sexual encounter. One party is normally more experienced than the other; and either party should have the right, at any moment, to say, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

— Julian Barnes

327. “Tragedies in hindsight look like farces.”

— Julian Barnes

328. “One small revenge might be to die and show no signs of having died.”

— Julian Barnes

329. “Try as I could – which wasn’t very hard – I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don’t think this is complacency; it’s more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something.”

— Julian Barnes

330. “One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped – it was his only hope now – that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying, would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely.”

— Julian Barnes

331. “Still, I’m not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.”

— Julian Barnes

332. “What did I care about saving the world if the world couldn’t, wouldn’t, save her?”

— Julian Barnes

333. “Had he been naive, or overambitious? Both, probably. In life, you might be a bohemian and an adventurer, but you also sought a pattern, an arrangement to help you through, even if – even as – you kicked against it.”

— Julian Barnes

334. “He had entered some state of grace – but one that did not exclude. He made you feel you were his co-thinker, even if you said nothing.”

— Julian Barnes

335. “An English silence – one in which all the unspoken words are perfectly understood by both parties – prevailed. I got into my bed and wept. The matter was never referred to again.”

— Julian Barnes

336. “I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened – when these new memories suddenly came upon me – it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream.”

— Julian Barnes

337. “You realize that you want official interference into other people’s lives but not into your own. You also realize that your truthfulness has become dangerously flexible.”

— Julian Barnes

338. “El arte siempre tiene al tiempo de su parte.”

— Julian Barnes

339. “Those in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell.”

— Julian Barnes

340. “Life always refused simplicity.”

— Julian Barnes

341. “When I felt myself escaping from the earth,” he commented, “my reaction was not pleasure but happiness.” It was “a moral feeling,” he added. “I could hear myself living, so to speak.”

— Julian Barnes

342. “Not that this let me off the hook. My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been. If only this had been the document Veronica had set light to.”

— Julian Barnes

343. “I want a more difficult life, that’s all. What I really want is a first-rate life. I may not get it, but the only chance I have lies in getting out of a second-rate life. I may fail completely, but I do want to try. It’s to do with me, not you; so don’t worry.”

— Julian Barnes

344. “Perhaps I just feel safer with the history that’s been more or less agreed upon.”

— Julian Barnes

345. “Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination – the prompter’s voice at his ear – which had added the words “for ever.” He hadn’t asked what she meant when she told him she loved him. What lover ever does? Those plush and gilded words rarely seem to need annotation at the time.”

— Julian Barnes

346. “Then I thought about Adrian. My old friend who had killed himself. And this had been the last communication he had ever received from me. A libel on his character and an attempt to destroy the first and last love affair of his life. And when I had written that time would tell, I had underestimated, or rather miscalculated: time was telling not against them, it was telling against me.”

— Julian Barnes

347. “My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as “petite and unopinionated”. My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes “short and bossy.”

— Julian Barnes

348. “But he would never join their number, never be a member of the smiling retinue of former lovers. He considered that sort of behavior rather beastly, in fact immoral. He refused to be turned from a lover into a dear friend. He was uninterested in that transition.”

— Julian Barnes

349. “Noah couldn’t do anything without first wondering what He would think. Now that’s no way to go on. Always looking over your shoulder for approval – it’s not adult, is it?”

— Julian Barnes

350. “And who does not want their love authenticated?”

— Julian Barnes