Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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. “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

305. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

307. “Tragedies in hindsight look like farces.”

— Julian Barnes

308. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

310. “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.”

— Julian Barnes

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

316. “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

317. “Compliments of the season to you, and may the acid rain fall on your joint and anointed heads.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

319. “This ought to have given him a whole storetank of existential rage, but somehow it didn’t;.”

— Julian Barnes

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

325. “The way, the truth and the life. You go on your way through life telling the truth.”

— 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. “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

328. “First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence.”

— Julian Barnes

329. “You only followed where you were going if you wanted to get back to where you had started from, and she knew that was impossible.”

— Julian Barnes

330. “In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives – and time itself – would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

332. “Life always refused simplicity.”

— Julian Barnes

333. “Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion.”

— Julian Barnes

334. “They say things are determined by genetics, by parenting, by heredity, by climate, by diet, by geography, by time spent in the womb, by nature, by nurture. They fail to hear the elephant in the room, trumpeting away: history.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

336. “People prefer to get what they want rather than what they deserve.”

— Julian Barnes

337. “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

338. “We could not be further from ballooning’s established tropes: freedom, spiritual exaltation, human progress. Redon’s eternally open eye is deeply unsettling. The eye in the sky; God’s security camera. And that lumpish human head invites us to conclude that the colonisation of space doesn’t purify the colonisers; all that has happened is that we have brought our sinfulness to a new location.”

— Julian Barnes

339. “Masters and parents used to remind us irritatingly that they too had once been young, and so could speak with authority. It’s just a phase, they would insist. You’ll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life – and truth, and morality, and art – far more clearly than our compromised elders.”

— Julian Barnes

340. “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

341. “But there is panic and pandemonium waiting to break out inside all of us, of this I am convinced. I’ve seen it roar out among the dying, as a last protest against the human condition and its chronic sadness.”

— Julian Barnes

342. “Well, in one sense, I can’t know what it is that I don’t know. That’s philosophically self-evident.”

— Julian Barnes

343. “No, I was an odder old fool, grafting pathetic hopes of affection onto the least likely recipient in the world.”

— Julian Barnes

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

347. “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

348. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes