John Barth Quotes
Collection of 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
We don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained.
— 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
Nobody knew how to be what they were right.
— 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
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
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
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
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
The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world.
— 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
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