Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

356. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

358. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

360. “And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.”

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “Logic: yes, where is logic? Where is it, for instance, in the next moment of my story?”

— Julian Barnes

366. “Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously?”

— Julian Barnes

367. “Constantly he went back over the evidence of his memories.”

— Julian Barnes

368. “They say time finds you out, don’t they?”

— Julian Barnes

369. “You remembered your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence. You didn’t have to see your life as any kind of triumph – his own had hardly been that – but you did need to tell yourself that it had been interesting, enjoyable, purposeful.”

— Julian Barnes

370. “One of the first things she asked me was why I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist. I couldn’t justify it, so I turned the face round, and put time on the outside, as normal, grown-up people did.”

— Julian Barnes

371. “Je zit er nog middenin. Je zult er altijd middenin blijven zitten. Nee, niet letterlijk. Maar in je hart. Niets houdt ooit op, niet als het zo diep is gaan zitten. Je zult altijd met een open wond blijven rondlopen. Dat is na verloop van tijd nog de enige keus. Met een open wond rondlopen of dood. Denk je ook niet?”

— Julian Barnes

372. “This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn’t just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he would have done in a book? Adrian should have gone snooping, or saved up his pocket money and employed a private detective; perhaps all four of us should have gone off on a Quest to Discover the Truth. Or would that have been less like literature and too much like a kids’ story?”

— Julian Barnes

373. “What happened to the truth is not recorded.”

— Julian Barnes

374. “And you can never prepare for this new reality in which you have been dunked.”

— Julian Barnes

375. “Monomania. Monogamy. Monotony. Nothing good begins this way.”

— Julian Barnes

376. “Perhaps Goethe never found the right woman.”

— Julian Barnes

377. “If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you, those you loved. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself. And because there was no choice, equally there was no possibility of avoiding moral corruption. –.”

— Julian Barnes

378. “Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can’t change.”

— Julian Barnes

379. “He had discovered love; but he had also begun to discover that love, far from making him ‘what he was’, far from spreading deep content all over him like carnation oil, would make him self-conscious and indecisive. He loved Tanya most clearly when he was away from her. When they were together, there were expectations on both sides which he was either unable to identify or couldn’t respond to.”

— Julian Barnes

380. “Have you anything to declare? Yes, I’d like to declare a small case of French flu, a dangerous fondness for Flaubert, a childish delight in French road-signs, and a love of the light as you look north. Is there any duty to pay on any of these? There ought to be.”

— Julian Barnes

381. “He said that there were three preconditions for happiness – stupidity, selfishness and good health.”

— Julian Barnes

382. “A woman’s right to choose – yes, I believed in that, theoretically and actually. Though I also believed in a man’s right to be consulted.”

— Julian Barnes

383. “We all pursue what we think is best for us, even if it means our extinction. Sometimes, especially if it means that.”

— Julian Barnes

384. “If I call myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn’t because I have acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance.”

— Julian Barnes

385. “He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn’t want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported.”

— Julian Barnes

386. “Love’s elastic. It’s not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn’t take away. So there’s no need to worry about that.”

— Julian Barnes

387. “If you’re going to be a grown-up,” said Joan, “you’ve got to start thinking about grown-up things. And number one is money.”

— Julian Barnes

388. “But if you think that only what is yours is yours, and that what is not your own is, just as it is, not your own, then no one will ever coerce you, no one will hinder you, you will blame no one, you will not accuse anyone, you will not do a single thing unwillingly, you will have no enemies, and no one will harm you, because you will not be harmed at all.”

— Julian Barnes

389. “Once, we were talking about public reaction to some political scandal, and I suggested that it was normal for people to need someone to blame. ‘Normal doesn’t mean it’s a good idea,’ she answered.”

— Julian Barnes

390. “When I tell people that she was the most grown-up person I have known, I suppose what I mean is that there were principles very close behind, if not actually embedded in, all her actions and thoughts.”

— Julian Barnes

391. “The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards.”

— Julian Barnes

392. “One secret of the Christian religion’s success was always to employ the best moviemakers.”

— Julian Barnes

393. “He felt life more clearly too – even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn’t worth the candle.”

— Julian Barnes

394. “For a woman, love has historically been a matter of possession followed by sacrifice: that’s to say, of being possessed and then of being sacrificed.”

— Julian Barnes

395. “And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.”

— Julian Barnes

396. “And secondly, reducing the diversity between people didn’t result in harmony within. The narcissism of small differences ensured this.”

— Julian Barnes

397. “He was too clever. If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything. You just leave common sense behind.”

— Julian Barnes

398. “From what I did and what I said Let them not seek to find who I was.”

— Julian Barnes

399. “It is a moment when a shift in the nature of literary fame occurs. Previously, a famous writer was a writer who became famous by writing. Wilde pioneered the idea of becoming famous first, and then getting down to the writing. By the end of 1882 he was “still” only a minor poet and diligent lecturer. But he was also famous on two continents and therefore primed for a literary career.”

— Julian Barnes

400. “Enforced monogamy is as much to say enforced happiness, which we know is not possible. Unenforced monogamy might seem possible. Romantic monogamy might seem to be desirable. But the first normally collapses back into a version of enforced monogamy, while the second is liable to become obsessive and hysterical. And thereby lies close to monomania. We should always distinguish between mutual passion and shared monomania.”

— Julian Barnes