Quotes by John Barth

“A limited imagination, as I understand it, gets things wrong. From its mere incapacity, like limited intelligence or limited physical strength, it fails to anticipate accurately and to come up with...”

“Our ability to experience life may be more or less limited by inexperience of art as well as vice versa, since each tends to increase the wattage of the great illuminator of both — namely the imagi...”

“Life teaches the storyteller his themes and subject matter; literature teaches him how to get a handle on them: what has been done already, what might be done differently, what's a story anyway, an...”

“[While] we have only one life, nevertheless that one life (that massive datum, John Updike calls it in his memoir Self-Consciousness) lends itself to any number of stories — and I'm speaking here n...”

“[A]rtistic Meisterstücken, even less-than-Meisterstücken, have always been points of departure for solitary meditation and contemplation, to a degree depending, I suppose, on the particular Meister...”

“There is a popular misconception of the Romantics as rebelling against all formal constraints in favor of untrammeled freedom (as in their fondness for wild gardens around those broken columns), an...”

“[O]ne does not write a truly contemporary novel … merely by writing about contemporary matters. … One writes a contemporary novel by writing it in a contemporary way.”

“The Romantics enthusiastically and optimistically rejected neoclassical forms; the Postmodernists are just as likely to embrace such forms, although the embrace is seldom unskeptical or unironic, h...”

“[T]he essentially human characteristic of general intellectual curiosity interests itself in the demonstration of previously unremarked interconnections between apparently disparate phenomena, as p...”

“The ascendancy of the novel is historically associated with the ascendancy of the middle class and the spread of general literacy, and those in turn, in the West at least, with the development of t...”