John Barth Quotes

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

Lance Olsen

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

John Barth

#3. A man's most useful friend and fearsome foe is the poet.

John Barth

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

John Barth

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.

John Barth

#8. 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

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

John Barth

#10. 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

#11. You're certain to get a decision in a trial.

John Barth

#12. I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they're capable of from thinking in that scale is something that's really unique to theology.

Marilynne Robinson

#13. The enemy you flee is not exterior to yourself

John Barth

#14. I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.

Robert Stone

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

John Barth

#16. 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

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

John Barth

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

John Barth

#19. For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion.

John Barth

#20. There is no way to master the fact with which I live.

John Barth

#21. Drolls & dreamers that we are, we fancy that we can undo what we fancy we have done.

John Barth

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

John Barth

#25. 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

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

John Barth

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

John Barth

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

John Barth

#29. ... 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

#30. Path's should be laid where people walk, instead of walking where paths are laid-

John Barth

#31. I long ago learned that one's illnesses are both pleasanter and more useful if one keeps their exact nature to himself: one's friends, uncertain as to the cause of one's queer behavior and strange sufferings, impute to one a mysteriousness often subtly convenient.

John Barth

#32. The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.

John Barth

#33. 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

John Barth

#34. 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

#35. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

John Barth

#36. The wisdom to recognize and halt follows the know-how to pollute past rescue. The treaty's signed, but the cancer ticks in your bones. Until I'd murdered my father and fornicated my mother I wasn't wise enough to see I was Oedipus.

John Barth

#37. 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

#38. 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

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

John Barth

#40. And never mind that the lessons he meant to be helpful, his students always make people miserable with, and flunk anybody that disagrees with them!

John Barth

#41. 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

#42. 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

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

John Barth

#44. 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

#45. 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

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

John Barth

#47. One way or another, no matter which theory of our journey is correct, it's myself I address; to whom I rehearse as to a stranger our history and condition, and will disclose my secret hope though I sink for it.

John Barth

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. His head always felt about to ache, but never began to.

John Barth

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

John Barth

#52. ... 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

#53. Too late she saw: what she'd favored him with in jest he had received with adoration.

John Barth

#54. Indeed, if I have yet to join the hosts of the suicides, it is because (fatigue apart) I find it no meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming.

John Barth

#55. I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

John Barth

#56. History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

John Barth

#57. 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

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

John Barth

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

John Barth

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

John Barth

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

John Barth

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

John Barth

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

John Barth

#64. Self knowledge is always bad news.

John Barth

#65. 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

#66. Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

John Barth

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

John Barth

#68. Others live for the lie of love; Echo lives for her lovely lies, loves for their livening.

John Barth

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

John Barth

#70. What I've learned is that the muses' decision to sing or not to sing is not based on the elevation of your moral purpose - they will sing or not, regardless.

John Barth

#71. 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

#72. BLAM! BLOOEY!
Twin thunderstorms struck Chesapeake Bay at about the same hour two weeks apart in the last spring and summer of the eighth decade of the twentieth century of the Christian era and bracketed our story like artillery zeroing in.

John Barth

#73. 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