John Barth Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
-
“Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.”
-- John BarthSource : "How to Seek Heroism in Demands" by Grande Lum, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 10, 2009.
-
“In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.”
-- John Barth -
“Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.”
-- John Barth -
“Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.”
-- John Barth -
-
“The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world.”
-- John Barth -
“The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.”
-- John BarthSource : John Barth (2006). “Where Three Roads Meet”, p.80, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
-
“Self knowledge is always bad news.”
-- John BarthSource : John Barth (2014). “Giles Goat Boy”, p.170, Anchor
-
“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.”
-- John Barth -
-
“Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.”
-- John BarthSource : John Barth (1984). “The Friday book: essays and other nonfiction”, Putnam Pub Group
-
“Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.”
-- John BarthSource : John Barth (2014). “Giles Goat-Boy”, p.83, Anchor
-
“Choosing is existence. To the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist,”
-- John Barth -
“not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.”
-- John Barth -
-
“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.”
-- John Barth -
“He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator -- though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.”
-- John Barth -
“One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.”
-- John Barth -
“Yet everyone begins in the same place; how is it that most go along without difficulty but a few lose their way?”
-- John Barth -
-
“You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.”
-- John Barth -
“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.”
-- John Barth -
“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?”
-- John Barth -
“I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me’s no joke.”
-- John Barth -
-
“I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.”
-- John Barth -
“Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.”
-- John Barth -
“It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.”
-- John BarthSource : JOHN BARTH (1956). “THE FLOATING OPERA”
-
-
“Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.”
-- John Barth -
“It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.”
-- John Barth -
“The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' - by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love.”
-- John BarthSource : "Chimera". Book by John Barth, 1972.
-
“My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: i'faith, there's time for naught but bold resolves!”
-- John Barth -
-
“Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.”
-- John BarthSource : L. Rust Hills, John Barth (1974). “Writer's choice”, Modern Library
-
“The Bible is not man's word about God, but God's word about man.”
-- John Barth
You may also like:
-
David Foster Wallace
Novelist -
Don DeLillo
Writer -
Donald Barthelme
Author -
Italo Calvino
Journalist -
James Joyce
Novelist -
John Cheever
Novelist -
John Updike
Novelist -
Jorge Luis Borges
Writer -
Joseph Heller
Novelist -
Kurt Vonnegut
Writer -
Philip Roth
Novelist -
Robert Coover
Author -
Samuel Beckett
Novelist -
Saul Bellow
Writer -
Thomas Pynchon
Novelist -
Vladimir Nabokov
Novelist -
William Gaddis
Novelist -
William H. Gass
Novelist
