Quotes by John Barth

“The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and couldn't be reached if it did.”

“Marilyn Marsh, who had about had it with Spain, declared to him [the old Spanish man]: … But it redounds to your national credit, the then Missus Turner went on in effect — she'd been reading up on...”

“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'Bri...”

“Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear, as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated.”

“[N]othing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it, from outside, by people.”

“[T]here is no will-o'-the-wisp so elusive as the cause of any human act.”

“[I]t is sometimes pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.”

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

“'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.”

“'Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.”

“Is a man a salvage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile manners? Or is salvagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?”

“Consider that if the novelist is like God and a novel like the universe, then the converse ought to have at least some some metaphorical truth: The universe is a novel; God is a novelist! (I have o...”

“I don't think it's a good idea, as a rule, for artists to explain their art, even if they can. Jorge Luis Borges puts it arrogantly: God shouldn't stoop to theology. A modern painter put it more po...”

“[T]he vocation of writing seriously involves the continuous and deep examination of one's own experience of life and the world, and of the language and literary conventions we use to register that ...”

“The simple burden of my essay [The Literature of Exhaustion] was that the forms and modes of art live in human history and are therefore subject to used-upness, at least in the minds of significant...”

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

“We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them.”

“The story of our life is not our life. It is our story.”

“A book is what gets me off: something with heft to it, that you can take in two hands and spread like a woman. Mnyum!”

“[G]ood readers read the lines and better readers read the spaces.”