Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Style is a function of theme. Style is not imposed on subject-matter, but arises from it. Style is truth to thought.”

— Julian Barnes

302. “Yes it was, but as I said, it depended on where – and who – you were. If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience “the sixties” until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties – or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

329. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “Tragedies in hindsight look like farces.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

339. “Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.”

— Julian Barnes

340. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

342. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

344. “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

345. “Life always refused simplicity.”

— Julian Barnes

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

349. “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

350. “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