John Barth Quotes

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.

Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it's at that point you need coaching.

You don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings... serendipitously.

All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.

Self knowledge is always bad news.

The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world.

The Bible is not man's word about God, but God's word about man.

A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.

The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.

The transaction will enable us to become a single source of integrated products and services that building owners want in order to optimize comfort and energy efficiency

Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

If you would learn a thing, straightway declare yourself a professor of it!

Yet everyone begins in the same place; how is it that most go along without difficulty but a few lose their way?

If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.

I don't see how anybody starts a novel without knowing how it's going to end. I usually make detailed outlines: how many chapters it will be and so forth.

Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.

It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.

Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.

Choosing is existence. To the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist.

This is an exciting time. A new chapter in our history.

More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles bills and proclamations.

Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and overlook the motive and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.