Julian Barnes Quotes

107 Sourced Quotes

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.

Julian Barnes
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
He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

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

Julian Barnes
The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

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

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

Julian Barnes
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
You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

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

Julian Barnes
And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It's been interesting to me, though I wouldn't complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand.

Julian Barnes
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

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

Julian Barnes
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
We have moved into an era when 'character' is a misleading concept. Character has been replaced by ego, and the exercise of authority as a reflection of character has been replaced by the psychopathic retention of power by all possible means and in mockery of all implausibilities.

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

Julian Barnes
If you're an old geezer in his rocker on the porch, you don't play basketball with kids. Old geezers don't jump. You sit and make a virtue of what you have. And what you also do is this; you make the kids think that anyone, anyone can jump, but it takes a wise old buzzard to know how to sit there and rock.

Julian Barnes
Imagine the organ of recollection as a left-luggage clerk at some thrumming terminus who looks after your picayune possessions until you next need them. Now consider what you're asking him to take care of. And for so little money! And for so little thanks! It's no wonder the counter isn't manned half the time.

Julian Barnes
Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

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

Julian Barnes
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

Julian Barnes
I've always thought you are what you are and you shouldn't pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you're pretending to be.

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

Julian Barnes
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
Love is only what people agree exists, what they agree to put a notional value on. Nowadays it's prized as a commodity by almost everyone. Only not by me. If you ask me, I think love is trading artificially high. One of these days the bottom is going to fall out of love.

Julian Barnes
His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.

Julian Barnes
Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

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

Julian Barnes
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