Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2024 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. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

355. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

358. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

361. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

366. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

368. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

377. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

391. “And remember, whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three adjectives, always distrust that description.”

— Julian Barnes

392. “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

393. “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

394. “This was a typical statement from my mother: lucid, opinionated, explicitly impatient of opposing views. Her dominance of the family, and her certainties about the world, made things usefully clear in childhood, restrictive in adolescence, and grindingly repetitive in adulthood.”

— Julian Barnes

395. “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

396. “The present looks back at some great figure of an earlier century and wonders, Was he on our side? Was he a goodie? What a lack of self-confidence this implies: the present wants both to patronise the past by adjudicating on its political acceptability, and also to be flattered by it, to be patted on the back and told to keep up the good work.”

— Julian Barnes

397. “He knew what they said of him locally: Oh, he likes to keep himself to himself. The phrase was descriptive, not judgemental. It was a principle of life the English still respected. And it wasn’t just about privacy, about an Englishman’s home – even a pebbledash semi – being his castle. It was about something more: about the self, and where you kept it, and who, if anyone, was allowed to fully see it.”

— Julian Barnes

398. “Wilde also established another prime rule of fame in the modern age: that there is no such thing as bad publicity, there is only publicity. Success is better measured in column inches than by what those columns contain.”

— Julian Barnes

399. “If I asked you “What is life?”, you would probably reply, in so many words, that it is all just a coincidence.”

— Julian Barnes

400. “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