[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

For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however skeptical we might be.

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.

— Julian Barnes

He always thought that Louie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief ANF guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead, they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

— 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

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 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

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

— Julian Barnes

His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unrepented realization 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