Julian Barnes Quotes

The feelings we all have as 50-year-olds are different than the feelings we all have as 30-year-olds. That informs everything we do.

We're both getting older, our children are starting to leave home. But I can say that I'm just as passionate a songwriter now in my 50s as I was in my 20s. But instead of talking about the general kind of angst that I felt as a teenager, I'm writing about more specific issues.

I think I have aged gracefully.

As our knees and hips and eyesight deteriorate, we become more dependable, less impulsive, kinder, and less moody. Psychologists call this the maturity principle. My own life experience fits this principle to a T.

The good part about getting older is you stop trying to prove anything to anyone, including yourself. All you are in the pursuit of is collecting experiences - beautiful, fragile little soap bubbles that you store in your heart, and every once in a while you pull one out and gaze at the delicate pictures it shows you.

Most people acquire a softer side with age and sometimes with dad that has been quite weird to see.

I softened in my old age.

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.

One can't get over the habit of being a little girl all at once.

My ideal goal is to "mature" into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.

For me, personally, there is one really interesting thing. You're all a bit too young for that, but when you get to a certain level of experience, accumulation of experience you start slowly to once in a while get a whiff of the feeling, I'd love to be twenty years younger but with what I know and have experienced at this point.

We do not mature through age. We mature in awareness.

When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.

Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.

I’ve aged, but I don’t think I’ve grown up.

Everything changes with age. The parts change with age, your feelings about them change, roles that I would've wanted to play 10 years ago, I don't want to play now.

I am all the ages I've ever been.

After thirty-five a man begins to have thoughts about women; before that he has feelings.

It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.

To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.

As we all grow and we get older, there are always little changes about our personality that happen.

Maturity is when you start feeling the motion of zaman (time) as if it is a sensuous caress. p.216

It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.

I'm good with getting older, because I feel like one day, I know I will love myself. I can't imagine staying at one age. Ideally, I'd want to be 20 physically but 40 mentally.

Act your age don't pretend to be older than you are give yourself time to grow