Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

309. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

319. “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

320. “Tragedies in hindsight look like farces.”

— Julian Barnes

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

327. “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

328. “Be approximately satisfied with approximate happiness. The only thing in life which is clear and beyond doubt is unhappiness.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— 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. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

335. “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

336. “It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instability beneath our feet.”

— Julian Barnes

337. “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

338. “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

339. “Beware of dreams,” Elizabeth Finch replied. “Also, as a general rule, beware of what most people aspire to.”

— Julian Barnes

340. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

342. “Life always refused simplicity.”

— Julian Barnes

343. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

345. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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