Julian Barnes Quotes

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

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

... forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.

~ Julian Barnes

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

~ Julian Barnes

If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.

~ Julian Barnes

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 the 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

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

~ Julian Barnes

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

~ Julian Barnes

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

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

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

You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.

~ Julian Barnes

WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

~ Julian Barnes

how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop.

~ Julian Barnes

The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.

~ Julian Barnes

Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.

~ Julian Barnes

Life always refused simplicity.

~ Julian Barnes

The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn't look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser.

~ Julian Barnes

A pier is a disappointed bridge, yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

~ Julian Barnes

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.

~ Julian Barnes

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

~ Julian Barnes