Julian Barnes famous quotes

I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not,except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it,and how this affects our dealings with others.Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it;some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and 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

#Sibling #Believe #Helping Others

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.
-- Julian Barnes

#Life #Book #Thinking

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
-- Julian Barnes

#Country

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
-- Julian Barnes

#Country #Pain #Reading

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
-- Julian Barnes

#Book #Great Book #Plunge

(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
-- Julian Barnes

#Grief #Sunshine #Years

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
-- Julian Barnes

#Memories #Imperfection #Documentation

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

#Art #Grief #Levels

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
-- Julian Barnes

#Book #Writing #Helping

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.
-- Julian Barnes

#Beautiful #Art #Writing

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
-- Julian Barnes

#Sympathy #Outcast

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.
-- Julian Barnes

#Strong #Fear #Lying

He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.
-- Julian Barnes

#Relationship #Fear #Hate

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.
-- Julian Barnes

#Book #Life Is

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

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
-- Julian Barnes

#Famous Love #Sex #Love Is

It is a bizarre thought that in this [U.S. 2008] presidential cycle we could have had a woman in the White House we might have a black man in the White House but if either of them had said they were atheists neither of them would have had a hope in hell.
-- Julian Barnes

#Atheist #Men #White

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.
-- Julian Barnes

#Memories #Believe #Events

When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?
-- Julian Barnes

#Book #Thinking #Reality

What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
-- Julian Barnes

#Nostalgia #Remember #Ends

What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.
-- Julian Barnes

#Self #Curiosity #Doe

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.
-- Julian Barnes

#Thinking #Rewards #Merit

If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?
-- Julian Barnes

#World #Next #Spirit

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

#Heart #Trouble

..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.
-- Julian Barnes

#Book #Looks #Information

I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
-- Julian Barnes

#Believe #Missing #Believe In God

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
-- Julian Barnes

#Past #Differences #Age

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
-- Julian Barnes

#Art #Reading #Skills

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also - if this isn't too grand a word - our tragedy.
-- Julian Barnes

#Attitude #Character #Tragedy

When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.
-- Julian Barnes

#Mind #Months #Bears

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.
-- Julian Barnes

#Simple #Purpose #Clarity

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.
-- Julian Barnes

#Forgotten #Remembered

Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.
-- Julian Barnes

#Believe #Men #Answers

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

#Strong #Memories #Short Life

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.
-- Julian Barnes

#Literature #Turns

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

#Lying #Night #Thinking

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
-- Julian Barnes

#Writing #Literature #Realizing

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.
-- Julian Barnes

#Writing #Thinking #Fiction

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
-- Julian Barnes

#Character #People

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
-- Julian Barnes

#Art #Reading #Skills

There's nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.
-- Julian Barnes

#Genius #Young

...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
-- Julian Barnes

#Depth #Difficulty #God Knows

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

#Companionship #Wonderful #Form

To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
-- Julian Barnes

#Book #Helping #Certain

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

#Waiting #Damage #Firsts

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

#Loss #Subtraction #Accumulation

You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?
-- Julian Barnes

#Long #Done #Moments

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
-- Julian Barnes

#Grief #Mean #Names

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
-- Julian Barnes

#Opposites #Common Sense #Decision

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

#Powerful #Responsibility #Sole

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

#Responsibility #Unrest #Accumulation

Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner's grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general's map.
-- Julian Barnes

#Fall #Boys #Rivers

And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.
-- Julian Barnes

#Struggle #Saws #Lifetime

Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?
-- Julian Barnes

#Eye #Elderly #Saws

We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
-- Julian Barnes

#Progress #Pace #Pieces

Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.
-- Julian Barnes

#People #Would Be #Opinion

And no, it wasn't shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.
-- Julian Barnes

#Feelings #Stronger #Guilt

[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
-- Julian Barnes

#Beautiful #Lying #Literature

...life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.
-- Julian Barnes

#Philosophical #Thinking #Decision

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

#Rain #Animal #Sky

There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were.
-- Julian Barnes

#Lazy #Reader

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.
-- Julian Barnes

#Book #Mind #Way

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

#Memories

Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
-- Julian Barnes

#Love Is #Thinking #Outcomes

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

#Book #Doe #Way

If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
-- Julian Barnes

#Clever #Arguing

Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
-- Julian Barnes

#Giving #Decision #Enough Time

Irony ... may be defined as what people miss.
-- Julian Barnes

#Writing #People #Missing

Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
-- Julian Barnes

#Wine #Blessing #Global Warming

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
-- Julian Barnes

#Stories

Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influence, and thats gone, thats true. But I dont think we have less influence in the hearts and minds of readers. I think, if anything, we have just as much, if not more.
-- Julian Barnes

#Country #Heart #Thinking

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

#Falling In Love #May #Down And

Every love story is a potential grief story.
-- Julian Barnes

#Grief #Stories #Love Story

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.
-- Julian Barnes

#Photography #Love Is #Magic

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.
-- Julian Barnes

#Psychics #Giving #Looks

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
-- Julian Barnes

#Anxiety #Usual #Firsts

You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.
-- Julian Barnes

#Eye #People #Age

Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.
-- Julian Barnes

#Grief #Patterns #Firsts

Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?
-- Julian Barnes

#Important #Lines #Speak

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.
-- Julian Barnes

#Age #Fifty #Antiques

You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.
-- Julian Barnes

#World #Glances

Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.
-- Julian Barnes

#Fashion #Girlfriend #Jobs

You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. and 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

#Taken #Two #Fire

Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.
-- Julian Barnes

#Hurt #Pain #Thinking

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

#Two #Together #World

I dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it
-- Julian Barnes

#Dream

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
-- Julian Barnes

#Years #Littles #Made

Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?
-- Julian Barnes

#Congratulations #Mean #Self