Famous Quotes & Sayings

Julian Barnes Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Julian Barnes.

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Famous Quotes By Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1363599

We listen to what people say, we read what they write - that's our evidence, that's our corroboration. But if the face contradicts the speaker's words, we interrogate the face. A shifty look in the eye, a rising blush, the uncontrollable twitch of a face muscle - and then we
know. We recognise the hypocrisy or the false claim, and the truth stands evident before us. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1641632

History is a raw onion sandwich, it just repeats, it burps. We've seen it again and again this year. Same old story, Same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 462436

It is better to waste your old age than to do nothing at all with it. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 946770

I think a great book - leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on - is a book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as telling new truths - about society or the way in which emotional lives are led, or both - such truths having not been previously available, certainly not from official records or government documents, or from journalism or television. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1163342

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1119137

When we fall in love, we hope - both egotistically and altruistically - that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 627234

If you want to make people pay attention to what you're saying, you don't raise your voice but lower it: this is what really commands attention. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1380082

Next to not living with those one loves, the worst torture is living with those one doesn't love. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 463644

And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love's last days had come. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1079045

Sarcasm is irony which has lost its soul — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 637448

Heroes become traitors, traitors become martyrs. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1032009

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 410541

Memory is identity ... You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 241553

You like this stuff?' she asked neutrally. 'Good to dance to,' I replied, a little defensively. 'Do you dance to it? Here? In your room? By yourself?' 'No, not really.' Though of course I did. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 221366

Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1174351

Gradually, he didn't doubt, the world would calm down into a gigantic welfare state devoted to sporting, cultural and sexual exchange, with the accepted international currency being items of hifi equipment. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 2238533

You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1201753

Major General Anders later reflected: I think it was the Earthrise that really kind of got everybody in the solar plexus ... We were looking back at our planet, the place where we evolved. Our Earth was quite colorful, pretty and delicate compared to the very rough, rugged, beat-up, even boring lunar surface. I think it struck everybody that here we'd come 240,000 miles to see the Moon and it was the Earth that was really worth looking at. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1879514

Love might or might not promote kindness, gratify vanity, and clear the skin, but it did not lead to happiness; there was always an inequality of feeling or intention present. such was love's nature. of course, it 'worked' in the sense that it caused life's profoundest emotions, made him fresh as a spring's linden-blossom and broke him like a traitor on the wheel. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 2150867

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve? — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1935771

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1297858

Freedom consists of conforming to the will of the majority. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 788447

I'd ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction. Well, perhaps not entirely. Coincidences would be permitted in the picaresque; that's where they belong. Go on, take them: let — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 529698

But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns kill, that money corrupts, that snow falls in winter. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1656226

The one thing that is very good in life today is death. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 775589

The despairing are always being urged to abstain from selfishness, to think of others first. This seems unfair. Why load them with responsibility for the welfare of others, when their own already weighs them down? — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 2021333

The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 598498

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

Julian Barnes Quotes 1422099

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1367838

The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn't God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God's magnanimity every time it stopped raining. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 927062

The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1414491

What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility? — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1230709

But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1613898

Integrity is like virginity: once lost, never recoverable — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1587297

You can put it another way, of course; you always can. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1529094

You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1528213

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

Julian Barnes Quotes 1527882

Sexual orthodoxy and the exercise of power. If a President can't keep his pants on, does he lose the right to rule us? If a public servant cheats on his wife does this make him more likely to cheat on the electorate? For myself, I'd rather be ruled by an adulterer, by some sexual rogue, than by a prim celibate or zipped-up spouse. As criminals tend to specialize in certain crimes, so corrupt politicians normally specialize in their corruption: the sexual blackguards stick to fucking, the bribe-takers to graft. In which case it would make more sense to elect proven adulterers instead of discouraging them from public life. I — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1490242

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1467912

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1427859

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1464140

Nobody stops to think about the world anymore. We live in a world where they make
children pay to see the fish eat. Nowadays even fish are exploited, she thought. Exploited, and then poisoned. The ocean out there is filling up with poison. The fish will die too — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1990760

Such was humanity's self-love, Nadar concluded, that most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 2235446

He died a modern death, in hospital, ... after medical science had prolonged his life to a point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 2155643

Isn't there something between stagnation and heading somewhere?" "Like?" "Like having a nice time. Enjoy the day and all that? — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 2153414

Tragedies in hindsight look like farces. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 2088359

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed ... — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 2085474

The more you learn, the less you fear. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 2060801

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 2039145

And I thought of a cresting wave of water, lit by a moon, rushing past and vanishing upstream, pursued by a band of yelping students whose torchbeams criss-crossed in the dark. There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 2004302

I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation ... the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68] — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1995350

How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren't living under Communism! — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1657273

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness? — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1949790

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough? — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1904917

And that was all the part of it - the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned paradox of it - in order to behave well, you have to behave badly. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1904503

Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1811303

Every day is Sunday" - that wouldn't make a bad epitaph, would it? — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1800103

But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1793881

I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1719660

Aeronautics did not lead to democracy, unless budget airlines count. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1697985

Every relationship contains within it the ghosts, or the shadows, of all the other relationships it isn't. All the abandoned alternatives, the forgotten choices, the lives you could have led but didn't and haven't. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1693721

Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 452896

Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn't open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you've looked. That's the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don't, but between those who want to know everything and those who don't. This search is a sign of love I maintain. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 760184

Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 678901

The heap of dirty dishes was normal for Arthur, who had applied for a reduction in his water rate on the grounds that he washed up only every fortnight, and then used the leftover liquid for watering his roses. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 673436

I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 667440

At best you have one of those debilitating conditions which come in many forms, and which some people decline to admit actually exist. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 631259

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 511561

How attracted to one another we had been; how light she felt on my lap; how exciting it always was; how, even though we weren't having "full sex," all the elements of it--the lust, the tenderness, the candour, the trust--were there anyway. And how part of me hadn't minded not "going the whole way"...This acceptance of less than others had was also due to fear, of course: fear of pregnancy, fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, fear of an overwhelming closeness I couldn't handle. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 509109

No sooner do we come into this world, than bits of us start to fall off. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 490895

Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 454893

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 781703

[Flaubert] didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 401709

Books are not life, however much we may wish they were — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 300627

The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern ... American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 300491

For Montaigne, the death of youth, which so often takes place unnoticed is the harder death; what we habitually refer to as 'death' is no more than the death of old age ... The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into nonexistence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth crabbed and regretful age. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 262961

History is not just the lies of the victors; it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 170399

Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 138566

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

Julian Barnes Quotes 109517

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 97275

An element of propaganda, of sales and marketing, always intervened between the inner and the outer person. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1215466

None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1386411

There's always talk. It's the same price as rain. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1375929

In an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, stunts the imagination. It is best to start life in a cheerful and open state of mind, believing in others, being optimistic, being frank with everyone about everything. And then, as one comes to understand things and people better, to develop a sense of irony. The natural progression of human life is from optimism to pessimism; and a sense of irony helps temper pessimism, helps produce balance, harmony. But — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1325227

One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1323937

Her ambitions were no longer specifically for happiness or financial security or freedom from disease (thought they included all three), but for something more general: the continuing certainty of things. She needed to know that she would carry on being herself. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1290066

That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1266834

What did I care about saving the world if the world couldn't, wouldn't, save her? — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 85073

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1228455

If novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of lfe's possibilities, this is what they'd do. At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various colours. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending; Traditional Half-and-Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist Arbitrary Ending; End of the World Ending; Cliffhanger Ending; Dream Ending; Opaque Ending; Surrealist Ending; and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to destroy the envelopes you didn't select. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1219761

Life ... is a bit like reading. ... If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it's yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing? — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1387879

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

Julian Barnes Quotes 1083561

The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1063429

Of course, there were other sorts of literature
theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical
but they were just dry wanks. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 1034669

We live on the flat, on the level, and yet - and so - we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 979680

The engineers of human souls'. There were two main problems. The first was that many people did not want their souls to be egineered, thank you very much. They were content with their souls being left as they were when they had come into this world; and when you tried to lead them, they resisted. Come to this free open-air concert, comrade. Oh, we really think you should attend. Yes, of course, it is voluntary, but it might be a mistake if you didn't show your face...
And the second problem with engineering human souls was more basic. It was this: who engineers the engineers? — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 897385

This is what those who haven't crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not exist. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 872490

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

Julian Barnes Quotes 865014

But then, no one told the whole truth about sex. And in that respect, nothing has changed. — Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Quotes 845959

I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life. — Julian Barnes