John Barth Quotes - Page 2

Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.

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.

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

not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.

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

The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.

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

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

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.

You don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings... serendipitously.

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

Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

The transaction will enable us to become a single source of integrated products and services that building owners want in order to optimize comfort and energy efficiency

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

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

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