John Barth quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Barth

John Barth Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Barth on Wise Famous Quotes.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

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

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

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

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

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

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

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

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

The enemy you flee is not exterior to yourself

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

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

Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

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

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

Not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.

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

Self knowledge is always bad news.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innocence is like youth,' he declared sadly, 'which is given to us only to expend and takes its very meaning from its loss.

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

It's not difficult to be encyclopedic in a work of fiction; it's damned difficult to be encyclopedic, I suppose, in truth.