John Barth Quotes & Sayings

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

There's a great difficulty in making
choices if you have any imagination at all. Faced with such a multitude of desireable choices, no one choice
seems satisfactory for very long by comparison with the aggregate desirability of all the rest, though compared to any *one* of the others it would not be found inferior. All equally attractive but none finally inviting. — John Barth

All the same, they [young, twenty-somethings] can't help feeling that the aged and even the infirm have somehow elected that condition ... or have as it were been assigned those roles ... so that they ... can play their youthful-energetic, all but immutable selves. — John Barth

Self knowledge is always bad news. — John Barth

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

Am I boring you? I don't really care, I suppose, but I'll be more comfortable if I knew all this interested you. No doubt when I get the hang of storytelling, after a chapter or two, I'll go faster and digress less often. — John Barth

Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn't true. I'm not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don't think ... I know what I'm talking about. — John Barth

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

The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis'
by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love. — John Barth

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

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame? — John Barth

Articulation! There, by Joe, was MY absolute, if I could be said to have one. At any rate, it is the only thing I can think of about which I ever had, with any frequency at all, the feelings one usually has for one's absolutes. To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking. — John Barth

My classes commenced on the seventh of September, a tall blue day as crisp as the white starched blouses of the coeds who filed into my classroom and nervously took their seats. Standing behind the lectern at eight o'clock sharp, suit fresh-pressed and chin scraped clean, I felt my nostrils flare like a stud's at the nubby tight sex of them, flustered and pink-scrubbed, giggling and moist; my tighs flexed, and I yawned ferociously. — John Barth

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

The wisdom to recognize and halt follows the know-how to pollute past rescue. The treaty's signed, but the cancer ticks in your bones. Until I'd murdered my father and fornicated my mother I wasn't wise enough to see I was Oedipus. — John Barth

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

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

The enemy you flee is not exterior to yourself — John Barth

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 — John Barth

That language may be a compound code, and that the discovery of an enormous complexity beneath a simple surface may well be more dismaying than delightful. E.g.: the maze of termite tunnels in your joist, the intricate cancer in her perfect breast, the psychopathology of everyday life, the Auschwitz in an anthill casually DDT'd by a child, the rage of atoms in a drop of ink - in short, anything examined curiously enough. — John Barth

A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth. — 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

That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history--disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favour of the fabulous irreal, and only in this latest enterprise had projected, not without misgiving, a detente with the realistic tradition. It is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover. — John Barth

There was some simple, radical difference about him. He hoped it was genius, feared it was madness, devoted himself to amiability and inconspicuousness. — John Barth

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

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

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

Having poured my drink, I may not live to taste it, or that it may pass a live man's tongue to burn a dead man's belly; that having slumbered, I may never wake, or having waked, may never living sleep. Having heard tick, will I hear tock? Having served, will I volley? Having sugared will I cream? Having eithered, will I or? Itching, will I scratch? Hemming, will I haw? — John Barth

BLAM! BLOOEY!
Twin thunderstorms struck Chesapeake Bay at about the same hour two weeks apart in the last spring and summer of the eighth decade of the twentieth century of the Christian era and bracketed our story like artillery zeroing in. — John Barth

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

Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression
a kind of rudimentary theater
as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means. — John Barth

On the proper role of coincidence in fiction
- more exactly in storymaking, ... Aristotle declares in effect that since real life now and then includes unlikely coincidences both idle and consequential ... a storymaker may legitimately deploy such a possible-though-improbable happenstance to begin the tale or to give its plot-screws an early turn. Thereafter, however, the Plausible (even when strictly impossible) is ever to be preferred to the Possible-but-Unlikely; and in the resolution of a plot, most particularly, coincidence ought to be eschewed. Fate in fiction, decrees the great A, ought to flow from character and situation, not from chance; let no god on wires drop down at climax-time to rescue the storymaker from whatever dramaturgical corner his want of experience, talent, or judgment has painted him into. — John Barth

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

Although my law practice pays my hotel bill, I consider it no more my career than a hundred other things: sailing, drinking, walking the streets, writing my 'Inquirey', starting at walls hunting ducks and 'coons,reading, playing politics, and whatnot. I'm interested in any number of things, and enthusiastic about nothing. — John Barth

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. — John Barth

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. — John Barth

I don't see how anybody starts a novel without knowing how it's going to end. I usually make detailed outlines: how many chapters it will be and so forth. — 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

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

In sum I'm not what either parent or I had in mind. One hoped I'd be astonishing, forceful, triumphant - heroical in other words. One dead. I myself conventional. I turn out I. — John Barth

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

Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling had
one all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years a
Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a
Soldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! All
Roads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more than
another, so that with one Life to spend I am a Man
bare-bumm'd at Taylors with Cash for but one pair of
Breeches, or a Scholar at Brookstalls with Money for a
single Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one,
impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions are
wondrous, but none is finer than the rest together. I
cannot choose, sweet Anna: twixt Stools my Breech falleth
to the Ground! — John Barth

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

The difference 'twixt poet and coxcomb is precisely that the latter stops gaps like a ship fitter caulking seams, merely to keep the boat afloat, while the former doth his work as doth a man with a maid: he fills the gap, but with vigor, finesse, and care; there's beauty and delight as well as utility in his plugging — John Barth

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

How come you write the way you do?" an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Don replied, "Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way he does."
Asked another, smiling but serious, "How can we become better writers than we are?"
"Well," DB advised, "for starters, read through the whole history of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up through last semester. That might help."
"But Coach Barth has already advised us to read all of literature, from Gilgamesh up through last semester ... "
"That, too," Donald affirmed, and twinkled that shrewd Amish-farmer-from-West-11th-Street twinkle of his. "You're probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything. — John Barth

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

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

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

Now, '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. Burlingame declared the difference 'twixt sour pessimist and proper gentleman lies just here: that one will judge good deeds by a morality of the motive and ill by a morality of deed, and so condemn the twain together, whereas your gentleman doth the reverse, and hath always grounds to pardon his wayward fellows. — John Barth

Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it's at that point you need coaching. — 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

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

Innocence is ignorance; ignorance is illusion; and Commencement, while it certainly is a metaphor, is no illusion. Commencement's for the disillusioned, not for the innocent. — John Barth

May I recommend three Maryland beaten biscuits, with water, for your breakfast? They are hard as a haul-seiner's conscience and dry as a dredger's tongue, and they sit for hours in your morning stomach like ballast on a tender ship's keel. They cost little, are easily and crumblessly carried in your pockets, and if forgotten and gone stale, are neither harder nor less palatable than when fresh. What's more, eaten first thing in the morning and followed by a cigar, they put a crabberman's thirst on you, such that all the water in a deep neap tide can't quench
and none, I think, denies the charms of water on the bowels of morning? — 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

What I've learned is that the muses' decision to sing or not to sing is not based on the elevation of your moral purpose - they will sing or not, regardless. — John Barth

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

... beg Love's pardon for your want of faith. Helen chose you without reason because she loves you without cause; embrace her without question and watch your weather change. — John Barth

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

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

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

I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me's no joke. — John Barth

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

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

One way or another, no matter which theory of our journey is correct, it's myself I address; to whom I rehearse as to a stranger our history and condition, and will disclose my secret hope though I sink for it. — John Barth

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. — John Barth

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

Quantitative changes suddenly become qualitative changes. From all of Marxism, which I once thought attractive enough, I find only this dictum remaining in the realm of my opinions. Water grows colder and colder and colder, and suddenly it's ice. The day grows darker and darker, and suddenly it's night. Man ages and ages, and suddenly he's dead. Quantitative changes suddenly become qualitative changes; differences in degree lead to differences in kind. — 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

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

I long ago learned that one's illnesses are both pleasanter and more useful if one keeps their exact nature to himself: one's friends, uncertain as to the cause of one's queer behavior and strange sufferings, impute to one a mysteriousness often subtly convenient. — John Barth

Indeed, if I have yet to join the hosts of the suicides, it is because (fatigue apart) I find it no meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming. — John Barth

... 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 Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor — 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

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. — John Barth

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

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse? — John Barth

One reason for not writing a lost-in-the-funhouse story is that either everybody's felt what Ambrose feels, in which case it goes without saying, or else no normal person feels such things, in which case Ambrose is a freak. — John Barth

My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: i'faith, there's time for naught but bold resolves! — 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

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

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

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

The difference here 'twixt simple and witty folk, if the truth be known, is that your plain man cares much for what stand ye take and not a fart for why ye take it, while your smart wight leaves ye whate'er stand ye will, sobeit ye defend it cleverly. — John Barth

So, reader, should you ever find yourself writing about the world, take care not to nibble at the many tempting symbols she sets squarely in your path, or you'll be baited into saying things you don't really mean, and offending the people you want most to entertain. Develop, if you can, the technique of the pall bearers and myself: smile, to be sure
for fucking dogs are truly funny
but walk on and say nothing, as though you hadn't noticed. — John Barth

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

Anastasia...' The name seemed strange to me now, and her hair's rich smell. What was it I held, and called Anastasia? A slender bagful of meaty pipes and pouches, grown upon with hairs, soaked through with juices, strung up on jointed sticks, the whole thing pushing, squirting, bubbling, flexing, combusting, and respiring in my arms; doomed soon enough to decompose into its elements, yet afflicted in the brief meanwhile with mad imaginings, so that, not content to jelly through the night and meld, ingest, divide, it troubled its sleep with dreams of passedness, of love. — John Barth