"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. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"There are two kinds of travel: first class and with children."
— 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 (Flaubert's Parrot)

"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 (Flaubert's Parrot)

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

"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. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never our own."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary."
— Julian Barnes (A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters)

"A pier is a disappointed bridge."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"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."
— Julian Barnes (Arthur and George)

"We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten."
— Julian Barnes (Nothing to Be Frightened Of)

"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 (Arthur and George)

"WHORES.
Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assissinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for."
— Julian Barnes (A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters)

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

"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 (Flaubert's Parrot)

"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 (Flaubert's Parrot)

"What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Sejarah bukanlah apa yang terjadi. Sejarah hanyalah apa yang dituturkan sejarawan kepada kita."
— Julian Barnes (A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters)

"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

"Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"[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 (Flaubert's Parrot)

"The land of embarrassment and breakfast."
— 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 (Flaubert's Parrot)

"(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 (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses endurate. Both go mouldy."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"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 (Nothing to Be Frightened Of)

"When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements … while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions. "
— Julian Barnes (A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters)

"The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"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 (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?"
— Julian Barnes

"Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us."
— Julian Barnes

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

"I was a normal eighteen-year-old: shuttered, self-conscious, untravelled and sneering; violently educated, socially crass, emotionally blurting."
— Julian Barnes

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

"How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?"
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"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 (Flaubert's Parrot)

"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 (Flaubert's Parrot)

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

"When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up. "
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"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 (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice."
— Julian Barnes