John Barth Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
"My project," he told us, "is to learn where to go by discovering where I am by reviewing where I've been — where we've all been."

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

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

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

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 [Jorge Luis] Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.

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
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
My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in love-making. That is to say, on the one hand, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and, on the other hand, so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

John Barth
Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear, as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated.

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

John Barth
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