Julian Barnes > Quotes

“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, Flaubert's Parrot

“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

“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

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

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

“(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

“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 10½ Chapters

“A pier is a disappointed bridge.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“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, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“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, The Sense of an Ending

“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“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, The Sense of an Ending

“Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.”
― Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

“We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“There are two kinds of travel: first class and with children.”
― Julian Barnes

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

“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, The Sense of an Ending

“I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
”
― Julian Barnes

“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

“What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“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

“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“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

“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, The Sense of an Ending

“You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess.”
― Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

“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

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

“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.”
― Julian Barnes

“Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“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 10½ Chapters

“Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“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

“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

“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

“It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“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 thougt 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, The Sense of an Ending

“Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“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

“What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt - and inflicted for precisely that reason.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“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