Quotes by 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 ...”

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

“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, poly...”

“Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling hadone all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years aBarrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty aSoldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and...”

“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...”

“In life, he said, there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life...”

“Now many crises in peoples lives occur because the hero role that theyve assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, orthe same thing in ef...”

“people still fall in love, and out, yes, in and out, and out and in, and they please each other, and hurt each other, isn't that the truth, and they do these things in more or less conventionally d...”

“There's a great difficulty in makingchoices if you have any imagination at all. Faced with such a multitude of desireable choices, no one choiceseems satisfactory for very long by comparison with t...”

“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 discredi...”

“This is an exciting time. A new chapter in our history.”

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

“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 ...”

“Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and overlook the motive and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.”

“More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles bills and proclamations.”

“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...”

“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, poly...”

“Now many crises in people’s lives occur because the hero role that they’ve assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or–the same thing in...”

“Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and overlook the motive and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.”

“More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles bills and proclamations.”