Julian Barnes Quotes

The footsteps a child follows are most likely to be the ones his parents thought they covered up.

Some children do what they’re told to do; some children do what they’re told not to do; all children do what they’re parents have done.

My parents were married for sixty-five years, and I was married for about ten minutes, my first year at Yale Drama School. Something, somehow, didn't get passed on to my generation.

My mom and my dad are still together, but so many of my friends who got married just a few years ago aren't. Maybe it's that we compare ourselves to our parents' generation, thinking, 'Who's still together, and are they happy?'

I know I've got a lot of my mother in me.

I look like my mother but behave like my father.

Setting a good example for your children does nothing but increase their embarrassment.

The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.

Obviously a child can never conceive solitude if his parents aren't living it somewhere themselves. I don't mean that to be alone you have to get down on your knees for an hour in a yoga posture.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.

Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken seriously, but there were still these two people lurking somewhere who in a split second could reduce you to nothing. In their presence, you were a big-headed baby again, crawling instead of walking.

Three of my children married Jewish people. One did not and that marriage didn't last more than half a dozen years or so. The others are still very close.

I have a big family and no one ever treated me like a child. They always treated me like an adult, like an equal.

As the fathers live, so the children play.

I wasn't the president. And my first wife thinks I'm great. And my second wife and my - and I have a great marriage. I mean, I have a great marriage.

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.

When an elder turns to face the dead, that means he turns away from facing the future and his own retirement in Phoenix, let's say. He turns and finds himself facing the children.

Parents can ruin children, and sometimes that's a learned behavior. Sometimes you can't blame your parents for it, sometimes you can. I think to me, that's what the whole paradox is, is people that have children that don't even know how to raise them.

"What is the greatest mistake a parent can make?" she asked. "To believe that your children will be just like you."

Children will listen to anything elders say to survive, and if you grew up without an elder telling you there was a god, what did your parents say to you?

I am only as good as my children are.

My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child's blindness, added to a student's thirst for knowledge.

Are we not witnessing a situation where children are conciously rejecting their parents' value despite love and devotion given to them? The present situation has arisen because parents have failed to transmit a sustaining faith to their children. The basic reason for this failure is that the parents themselves lacked faith. Without faith, their love was an image not a reality, a statement of words not an expression of feelings

The suspicious parent makes an artful child.

I think the single most important question is how do you maximize the number of children who grow up in stable two-parent households. We know in all kinds of ways it makes a huge difference to how kids come out and we are hardening into a caste society where some kids do better in all kinds of ways because they have two parents and others don't.