Quotes from John Barth

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

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.

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?

Self knowledge is always bad news.

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

not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.

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.

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.

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

Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

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.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay.

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.

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

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?

path's should be laid where people walk, instead of walking where paths are laid-

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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