Quotes from 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.

That anything should live, grow, evolve, reflect, respond to beauty, reproduce its kind... or make further beauty of another kind. Oh, wonderful.

Man's lot? He is by mindless lust engendered and by mindless wrench expelled, from the Eden of the womb to the motley, mindless world. He is Chance's fool, the toy of aimless Nature—a mayfly flitting down the winds of Chaos!

God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.

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.

Tal y como están las cosas hoy en día, el sexo no significa nada. Es solo un deporte, como el tenis, ¿sabes? Lo que verdaderamente es íntimo entre un hombre y una mujer es la comunicación.

Brez pravega upanja upam, da sem fikcija.

Thus it is I accept without much grumble their failings and my own: the abuse of my enemies, the lapses of my friends; the growing pains in both my legs, my goatly seizures, my errors of fact and judgement, my failures of resolve–all these and more, the ineluctable shortcomings of mortal studenthood.

2. Lake Erie The wisdom to recognize and halt follows the know-how to pollute past rescue.

But I reckon we can manage somehow. The important thing to remember, after all, is that it's meant to be a fun house; that is, a place of amusement. If people really got lost or injured or too badly frightened in it, the owner'd go out of business. There'd even be lawsuits. No character in a work of fiction can make a speech this long without interruption or acknowledgment from the other characters.

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.

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

Mi è sempre parso, nei pochi romanzi che ho letto di quando in quando, che esigano parecchio dai lettori quegli autori che iniziano i loro racconti furiosamente, nel bel mezzo delle cose, invece che entrandovi, indietreggiando o di sbieco, con dolcezza.

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.

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.

Only a wittol is certain he's been cuckolded or not

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

U fufasto i fa?kasto grmlje on bježi, gdje vabe dame a gospoda vrebaju iz tame.

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.

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.

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.

he felt that a treasure-house of new fiction lay vaguely under his hand, if he could only find the key to it.

Innocence is like youth,' he declared sadly, 'which is given to us only to expend and takes its very meaning from its loss.

The necessity for an observer makes perfect observation impossible.