John Barth Quotes

Quotes about:

• Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

  John Barth

  Sports, Hero, Stories

  "How to Seek Heroism in Demands" by Grande Lum, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 10, 2009.

  85 Copy quote

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

  John Barth

  Art, Skills, Doe

  65 Copy quote

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

  John Barth

  Stories, Life Is

  John Barth (2006). “Where Three Roads Meet”, p.80, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  17 Copy quote

• Self knowledge is always bad news.

  John Barth

  Self, News, Self Knowledge

  John Barth (2014). “Giles Goat Boy”, p.170, Anchor

  9 Copy quote

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

  John Barth

  Writing, Interesting, World

  10 Copy quote

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

  John Barth

  Self, Loathing, Self Loathing

  John Barth (2014). “Giles Goat-Boy”, p.83, Anchor

  12 Copy quote

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

  John Barth

  Simple, Talent, Complicated

  7 Copy quote

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

  John Barth

  Artist, Generations, Scene

  16 Copy quote

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

  John Barth

  Life, Tuition

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Ships, Sometimes, Monsoons

  John Barth (1984). “The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction”

  76 Copy quote

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

  John Barth

  History, Political, Secret

  66 Copy quote

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

  John Barth

  People, Valuable, Values

  JOHN BARTH (1956). “THE FLOATING OPERA”

  9 Copy quote

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

  John Barth

  World, Lions, Innocence

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Betrayal, Writing, Men

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Years, Knowing

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Heart, Angel, Men

  16 Copy quote

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

  John Barth

  Existence

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Philosophy, Sleep

  John Barth (2012). “Final Fridays: Essays, Lectures, Tributes & Other Nonfiction, 1995-”, p.262, Counterpoint Press

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Past, Men, Thinking

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Love, Reading, Mean

  "Chimera". Book by John Barth, 1972.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Sweet, Self, Play

  14 Copy quote

• 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 Barth

  Art, Mean, Men

  John Barth (1984). “The Friday book: essays and other nonfiction”, Putnam Pub Group

  4 Copy quote

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

  John Barth

  May, Stones, Matter

  JOHN BARTH (1956). “THE FLOATING OPERA”

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Mistake, Coaching, Needs

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Knowing, Ends, Chapters

  6 Copy quote

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