Julian Barnes quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Julian Barnes on Wise Famous Quotes.

Cooking is the transformation of uncertainty (the recipe) into certainty (the dish) via fuss.

When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world

Religion decays, the icon remains; a narrative is forgotten, yet its representation still magnetizes.

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

Did you leave me because of me?" "No," she said. "I left you because of us.

The conventional accept and are frequently charmed by a certain unconventionality.

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

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.

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

Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense.

Everything is connected, even the parts we don't like, especially the parts we don't like.

Wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

Old love is a row of beach huts in November.

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil's mark or the snorkel of sanity.

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

In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony.

As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.

Some Englishman once said marriage is a long dull meak with pudding served first

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

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

Integrity is like virginity: once lost, never recoverable

I am only a literary lizard basking the day away beneath the great sun of Beauty. That's all.

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

You must not be angry with me. You must think of me as an incomplete person.

Gustave's last years are arid and solitary. He

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

Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion

Though always frank, the novelist was never wholly sincere.

Life always refused simplicity.

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

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

Life was the cat that dragged the parrot downstairs by its tail; his head banged against every step.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?

I am a worm in comparison with His Excellency. I am a worm.' 'Yes, that's just it, you are a worm indeed.

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

The complications of life do not end at the altar; some might say that this is where they begin.

But if you're very clever, I think there's something that can unhinge you if you're not careful.

How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?

...and who's to say what would have been for the best? You only found out afterwards, when it was too late.

The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well.

The past is something we can neither hold on to nor move entirely beyond.

But if being on the level didn't shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds.

I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.

Ooks look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.

Honour is not just a matter of internal good feeling, but also of external behaviour.

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

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.

lethargic meliorist;

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

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

I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.

This ought to have given him a whole storetank of existential rage, but somehow it didn't;

For all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as.

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

It was perfectly possible to be an artist, yet also to be robust and responsible.

It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to.

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

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

If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.

I don't ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don't have the power, alas.

Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.

This [...] isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you witnessed.

Those in the middle got killed; governments and terrorists survived. At

Fearless to the strong; humble to the weak,

All true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function. A

Sarcasm is irony which has lost its soul

Poets don't run out of material the way novelists do because they don't depend on material in the same way.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

But you find yourself repeating, "They grow up so quickly, don't they?" when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that.

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

Poetry's packaged as a late-night slot, a quote minority taste unquote, like water-skiing or goat-fucking or something.

Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic.

I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.

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

She knew me better than anyone else in the world. And still wanted to have lunch with me. And let me go on and on about myself.

Khrennikov had an average ear for music, but perfect pitch when it came to power.

And since the griefstruck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don't, offence-giving and offence-taking are common.

The more so because, among its repetitions, it is always looking for new ways to prick you.

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

( ... ) juries should ask not "Is he guilty?" but rather "Is he dangerous?

Medicine then must have been such an exciting, desperate, violent business; nowadays it is all pills and bureaucracy.

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?

Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand?

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

The more you learn, the less you fear.

Freedom consists of conforming to the will of the majority.

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

But cockteasing is also a metaphor: she is someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you.

Every love story is a potential grief story.

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