John Barth Quotes – Quoterati

Best Quotes by John Barth (Top 10)

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.
John Barth
Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.
John Barth
More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.
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
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
Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.
John Barth
Self knowledge is always bad news.
John Barth
All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.
John Barth
I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.
John Barth
Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.
John Barth

Nobody knew how to be what they were right.
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.
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's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.
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
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
It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.
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