Julian Barnes Quotes

Life flies by, and it's easy to get lost in the blur. In adolescence, it's 'How do I fit in?' In your 20s, it's 'What do I want to do?' In your 30s, 'Is this what I'm meant to do?' I think the trick is living the questions. Not worrying so much about what's ahead but rather sitting in the grey area - being OK with where you are.

All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence.

I'm always interested in how people, myself included, have ideas of themselves, of how they thought they would be, or of how they want to be seen. And the older you get, the world keeps telling you different things about yourself. And how people either adjust to those things and let go of adolescent notions. Or they dig in deeper.

I do think I feel it but you don't think you are cause at a certain time you are no age but you don't think you are anything. You feel the life you have lived. I feel that. It's been a long fifty years.

You know, I don't think I had a concept of what I would be or do.

I think understanding your life as a story is a really terrific way of kind of knowing where you are and knowing who you are.

I always imagined that magically, at some point, I would settle into this very easy and refined sophistication, but it turns out that who you are at eleven is pretty much who you are at 27, so I don't know how much I've learned over the years.

Some ideas, like what you're going to do with your life, take time to form.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self.

Going into my 20s, I was uncertain, trying to figure out what my relationship to acting is.

I never had the chance to consider what or how I wanted to be.

In your 20s, you're just a sketch of what you think you're trying to be.

I needed to carve out my own place and find out what I was going to do.

I spent the first 25 years of my life not knowing what I wanted to do.

I'm not that tough; I'm not that smart. I need life telling me who I am, showing me my mind constantly. I wouldn't see it in a cave.

I might have lived long enough to learn all this in the long haul, but I would have been just another soul taking up time and space for a long spell before I learned.

I had no idea what I wanted to be when I was 17. I just knew I wanted to be something larger than myself.

I've always thrown myself into different kinds of experiences, sometimes into really bad things. But, you grow up. You become more of a woman and you know yourself. I think knowing yourself is a wonderful thing especially when you're in your 40s and you're kind of in your skin. Life is not so confusing anymore.

I have a really wide range of interests and I've still got time to work out my exact direction.

I have a boyfriend and a dog, and I still haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up.

If I had one singular galvanizing ambition in life, I would try to reverse engineer toward it, but I don't.

I had always wanted to belong, and I had been thinking that this was going to get solved when I had money, and instead, I had no idea how I wanted to live my life. And no one teaches you what to do after you achieve financial independence. So I had to confront that.

Everybody's constantly growing. In your twenties, you can learn a lot, and you can be very smart and clever and savvy. Especially these kids today. They seem like they have it all together. But let's talk to them again when they're 40 years old and see really who they are. Is it who they thought they were at 25?

Our lives teach us who we are.

I was a confused young man. I didn't know what I wanted to be.