John Barth Quotes: top 46 famous quotes about John Barth

John Barth Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational John Barth quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

For Guy Davenport--whom he told me John Barth once called the last modernist--modernism is 'a renaissance of the archaic'. — Lance Olsen

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

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

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

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant — John Barth

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

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

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated. — 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 enemy you flee is not exterior to yourself — John Barth

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

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

Nobody knew how to be what they were right. — John Barth

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

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

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! — John Barth

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

Self knowledge is always bad news. — John Barth

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

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. — John Barth

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

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

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

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. — John Barth

You're certain to get a decision in a trial. — John Barth

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

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

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

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

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

The horror of our history has purged me of opinions. — John Barth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero. — John Barth