John Barth Quotes

If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, 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

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

That clever folk care less for what ye think than why ye think it. ~ John Barth

So, I begin each day with a gesture of cynicism, and close it with a gesture of faith; or, if you prefer, begin it by reminding myself that, for me at least, goals and objectives are without value, and close it by demonstrating that the fact is irrelevant. A gesture of temporality, a gesture of eternity. It is in the tension between these two gestures that I have lived my adult life. ~ John Barth

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

That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history--disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favour of the fabulous irreal, and only in this latest enterprise had projected, not without misgiving, a detente with the realistic tradition. It is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover. ~ 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 have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist. ~ John Barth

Am I boring you? I don't really care, I suppose, but I'll be more comfortable if I knew all this interested you. No doubt when I get the hang of storytelling, after a chapter or two, I'll go faster and digress less often. ~ John Barth

Drolls & dreamers that we are, we fancy that we can undo what we fancy we have done. ~ John Barth

people still fall in love, and out, yes, in and out, and out and in, and they please each other, and hurt each other, isn't that the truth, and they do these things in more or less conventionally dramatic fashion, unfashionable or not, go on, I'm going, and what goes on between them is still not only the most interesting but the most important thing in the bloody murderous world ~ John Barth

A man's most useful friend and fearsome foe is the poet. ~ John Barth

In sum I'm not what either parent or I had in mind. One hoped I'd be astonishing, forceful, triumphant - heroical in other words. One dead. I myself conventional. I turn out I. ~ John Barth

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. ~ John Barth

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. ~ John Barth

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

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

The enemy you flee is not exterior to yourself ~ John Barth

There was some simple, radical difference about him. He hoped it was genius, feared it was madness, devoted himself to amiability and inconspicuousness. ~ John Barth

Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn't true. I'm not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don't think ... I know what I'm talking about. ~ John Barth

One reason for not writing a lost-in-the-funhouse story is that either everybody's felt what Ambrose feels, in which case it goes without saying, or else no normal person feels such things, in which case Ambrose is a freak. ~ John Barth

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

Now many crises in people's lives occur because the hero role that they've assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or–the same thing in effect–because they haven't the imagination to distort the new situation to fit their old role. This happens to parents, for instance, when their children grow older, and to lovers when one of them begins to dislike the other. If the new situation is too overpowering to ignore, and they can't find a mask to meet it with, they may become schizophrenic–a last-resort mask–or simply shattered. All questions of integrity involve this consideration, because a man's integrity consists in being faithful to the script he's written for himself.
"I've said you're too unstable to play any one part all the time–you're also too unimaginative–so for you these crises had better be met by changing scripts as often as necessary. This should come naturally to you; the important thing for you is to realize what you're doing so you won't get caught without a script, or with the wrong script in a given situation. You did quite well, for example, for a beginner, to walk in here so confidently and almost arrogantly a while ago, and assign me the role of a quack. But you must be able to change masks at once if by some means or other I'm able to make the one you walked in with untenable. Perhaps–I'm just suggesting an offhand possibility–you could change to thinking of me as The Sagacious Old Mentor, a ~ John Barth

... 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.
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor ~ John Barth

Let your repentance salt my shoe leather," I said presently, "and then, as I lately sheathed my blade of anger, so sheath you my blade of love. ~ John Barth

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

Not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero. ~ John Barth

[Plot is] the gradual perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a new and complexified equilibrium. ~ John Barth

We don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. ~ John Barth

All the same, they [young, twenty-somethings] can't help feeling that the aged and even the infirm have somehow elected that condition ... or have as it were been assigned those roles ... so that they ... can play their youthful-energetic, all but immutable selves. ~ John Barth

[T]he world is richer in associations than meanings . . . and it is the part of wisdom to distinguish between the two. ~ 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

What a sentence, everything was wrong from the outset. ~ John Barth

It's not difficult to be encyclopedic in a work of fiction; it's damned difficult to be encyclopedic, I suppose, in truth. ~ John Barth

The difference here 'twixt simple and witty folk, if the truth be known, is that your plain man cares much for what stand ye take and not a fart for why ye take it, while your smart wight leaves ye whate'er stand ye will, sobeit ye defend it cleverly. ~ John Barth

The nightsea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a shore that may not exist and couldn't be reached if it did. ~ 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 Barth

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

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

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. ~ 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

Although my law practice pays my hotel bill, I consider it no more my career than a hundred other things: sailing, drinking, walking the streets, writing my 'Inquirey', starting at walls hunting ducks and 'coons,reading, playing politics, and whatnot. I'm interested in any number of things, and enthusiastic about nothing. ~ John Barth

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant ~ John Barth

Having poured my drink, I may not live to taste it, or that it may pass a live man's tongue to burn a dead man's belly; that having slumbered, I may never wake, or having waked, may never living sleep. Having heard tick, will I hear tock? Having served, will I volley? Having sugared will I cream? Having eithered, will I or? Itching, will I scratch? Hemming, will I haw? ~ John Barth

Intellectual discussion, after all, is the real joy of the winter of life, when other pleasures have flown, as it were. ~ John Barth

Self knowledge is always bad news. ~ John Barth

Others live for the lie of love; Echo lives for her lovely lies, loves for their livening. ~ John Barth

Love it is that drives and sustains us!' I translate: we don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us. ~ John Barth

To realize that nothing makes any final difference is overwhelming; but if one goes no farther and becomes a saint, a cynic or a suicide on principle, one hasn't reasoned completely. The truth is that nothing makes any difference, including that truth. Hamlet's question is, absolutely, meaningless. ~ John Barth

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

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

May I recommend three Maryland beaten biscuits, with water, for your breakfast? They are hard as a haul-seiner's conscience and dry as a dredger's tongue, and they sit for hours in your morning stomach like ballast on a tender ship's keel. They cost little, are easily and crumblessly carried in your pockets, and if forgotten and gone stale, are neither harder nor less palatable than when fresh. What's more, eaten first thing in the morning and followed by a cigar, they put a crabberman's thirst on you, such that all the water in a deep neap tide can't quench
and none, I think, denies the charms of water on the bowels of morning? ~ John Barth

In life," he said, "there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you're an usher in a wedding. From the groom's viewpoint he's the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bridge and groom both are minor figures. What you've done is choose to play the part of a minor character: it can be pleasant for you to pretend to be less important you know you are, as Odysseus does when he disguises as a swineherd. And every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character, condescending to witness the spectacle. So in this sense fiction isn't a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life.
"Now, not only are we the heroes of our own life stories–we're the ones who conceive the story, and give other people the essences of minor characters. But since no man's life story as a rule is ever one story with a coherent plot, we're always reconceiving just the sort of hero we are, and consequently just the sort of minor roles that other people are supposed to ~ John Barth

Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence...
'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegia ~ John Barth

... beg Love's pardon for your want of faith. Helen chose you without reason because she loves you without cause; embrace her without question and watch your weather change. ~ 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

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

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

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying. ~ John Updike

Innocence is like youth,' he declared sadly, 'which is given to us only to expend and takes its very meaning from its loss. ~ John Barth

Quantitative changes suddenly become qualitative changes. From all of Marxism, which I once thought attractive enough, I find only this dictum remaining in the realm of my opinions. Water grows colder and colder and colder, and suddenly it's ice. The day grows darker and darker, and suddenly it's night. Man ages and ages, and suddenly he's dead. Quantitative changes suddenly become qualitative changes; differences in degree lead to differences in kind. ~ John Barth

That language may be a compound code, and that the discovery of an enormous complexity beneath a simple surface may well be more dismaying than delightful. E.g.: the maze of termite tunnels in your joist, the intricate cancer in her perfect breast, the psychopathology of everyday life, the Auschwitz in an anthill casually DDT'd by a child, the rage of atoms in a drop of ink - in short, anything examined curiously enough. ~ John Barth

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

Anastasia...' The name seemed strange to me now, and her hair's rich smell. What was it I held, and called Anastasia? A slender bagful of meaty pipes and pouches, grown upon with hairs, soaked through with juices, strung up on jointed sticks, the whole thing pushing, squirting, bubbling, flexing, combusting, and respiring in my arms; doomed soon enough to decompose into its elements, yet afflicted in the brief meanwhile with mad imaginings, so that, not content to jelly through the night and meld, ingest, divide, it troubled its sleep with dreams of passedness, of love. ~ John Barth

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

When you look at this mirror I hope you'll remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom. ~ John Barth

Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling had
one all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years a
Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a
Soldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! All
Roads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more than
another, so that with one Life to spend I am a Man
bare-bumm'd at Taylors with Cash for but one pair of
Breeches, or a Scholar at Brookstalls with Money for a
single Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one,
impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions are
wondrous, but none is finer than the rest together. I
cannot choose, sweet Anna: twixt Stools my Breech falleth
to the Ground! ~ John Barth

There's a great difficulty in making
choices if you have any imagination at all. Faced with such a multitude of desireable choices, no one choice
seems satisfactory for very long by comparison with the aggregate desirability of all the rest, though compared to any *one* of the others it would not be found inferior. All equally attractive but none finally inviting. ~ John Barth

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

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

For Guy Davenport--whom he told me John Barth once called the last modernist--modernism is 'a renaissance of the archaic'. ~ Lance Olsen

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

For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion. ~ John Barth

Articulation! There, by Joe, was MY absolute, if I could be said to have one. At any rate, it is the only thing I can think of about which I ever had, with any frequency at all, the feelings one usually has for one's absolutes. To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking. ~ John Barth

Innocence is ignorance; ignorance is illusion; and Commencement, while it certainly is a metaphor, is no illusion. Commencement's for the disillusioned, not for the innocent. ~ John Barth

He hesitated a moment, shifted the load to his left arm and mimed a sword stroke in the air. Crowley looked over his shoulder at the serving boy with some concern. "Planning on beheading me, are you?" he asked. Rafe smiled at him. "No sir, Ranger. Just getting the right side, like. Just shift yourself over while I put these down, before I forget which side is which, now." Crowley ~ John Flanagan

The myth is that IP rights are as important as our rights in castles, cars, and corn oil. IP is supposedly intended to encourage inventors and the investment needed to bring their products to the clinic and marketplace. ~ John Sulston

We are snowflakes, melting
on the tongue of the universe. ~ John Mark Green

I'd like to say I'm on a natural high," Cam said.
"This hike would have ruined John Denver," Roland agreed. ~ Lauren Kate

Our national conservation effort must include the complete spectrum of resources: air, water, and land; fuels, energy, and minerals; soils, forests, and forage; fish and wildlife. Together they make up the world of nature which surrounds us- of the American heritage. ~ John F. Kennedy

Ethical is 'I'll wait and do what's right even in the hardest times and even if I have to give up gains to do it.' ~ John J. Mack

What makes good bread? It is a question of good flour and slow fermentation. In the old days we used to leave the dough to ferment for at least three or four hours, and it wasn't necessary to put chemicals into the dough. Today the farmers get much bigger crops from the same piece of ground, but the wheat has lost its taste. And to make it look nice and white - comme un cadavre - the millers grind it up fine and sift it, so you are left with very little except starch. ~ John Hillaby

This fundraising is consuming us. It's impossible to overstate, I think, what it's doing to members and their ability to just focus on the job that they were elected to do. The collective concentration of the institution is being undermined every day by the need to fund-raise. ~ John Sarbanes

A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men. ~ John Holdren

No matter what business you're in, business is business, and financing and money are critical. I would have made a lot fewer mistakes if I had more schooling in that area. ~ Daymond John

Colder by the hour, more dead with every breath. ~ John Green

The key to praying with power is to become the kind of persons who do not use God for our ends but are utterly devoted to being used for His ends. ~ John Piper

No writer for the press, however humble, is free from the burden of keeping his purpose high and his integrity white. ~ John Boyle O'Reilly

Even a prison the size of a universe is still a prison. And it is every prisoner's duty to escape. ~ John C. Wright

Be not so intent upon your particular callings as to make them interfere with your general calling. Beware you lose not your God in the crowd and hurry of earthly business. Mind that solemn warning, But they that will be rich, fall into temptation, and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition, ~ John Flavel

I think it is only natural that people have anxiety about the economy because the economy is real. It is their job, their ability to service their mortgage and look after their family. And in the final analysis, nothing is more important than your capacity as a breadwinner or an earner to provide for those that rely on you. ~ John Key

I want to be like Ford Madox Ford. I want to be talking to somebody across a fire, and I want him to join me and listen to me, and if he is fidgeting in his chair, I know I am not doing my job. I am a storyteller, and I know most people like a story. ~ John Le Carre

To have a song work for the movie, it can't just be written apart and shoved in. It's got to come out of the action. It's got to talk about the characters, not the story: it has to augment that action. ~ John Hughes

They keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V.
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see ~ John Lennon

I see no reason to hide who I am or what I look like. ~ Lara St. John

Happiness can only be achieved by looking inward & learning to enjoy whatever life has and this requires transforming greed into gratitude. ~ John Chrysostom

And, long after Clark had gone home, Solomon stayed up wondering if everyone falls in love with someone who can't love them back. ~ John Corey Whaley

She loves mysteries so much, she became one. ~ John Green