John Barth Quotes

38 quotes in 572 categories

• Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life 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…
• 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…
• Self knowledge is always bad news.
• 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…
• Yet everyone begins in the same place; how is it that most go along without difficulty but a few lose their way?
• 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 story of your life is not your life; it's your story.
• Choosing is existence. To the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist,
• The Bible is not man's word about God, but God's word about man.
• More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.
• 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 ...…
• The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world.
• 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…
• It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.
• Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.
• It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.
• 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…
• The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.
• Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

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