John Barth Quotes

38 quotes in 572 categories

• To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of… Alive
• 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… Building
• Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back. Cart
• In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity. Appeal
• Nobody knew how to be what they were right. Funny
• Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene. Artist
• not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero. Becomes
• 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… Among
• 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… All
• Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state. Getting Ready
• 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.… All
• All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate. All
• I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated. Admire
• 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… Baseness
• This is an exciting time. A new chapter in our history. Chapter
• 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
• You're certain to get a decision in a trial. Certain
• My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. Heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so… Appeal

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