707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people’s eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.

I think I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.

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

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.

One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That.

Isn’t growing up a necessary process of losing one’s innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.

Music – good music, great music – had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.

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

Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike’s readable. Hawthorne’s readable. It’s a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake,” before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.