John Barth Quotes
Top 45 wise famous quotes and sayings by John Barth
John Barth Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from John Barth on Wise Famous Quotes.
We don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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!
The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world.
In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.