John Barth Quotes
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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, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' - by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love.
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Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.
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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'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.
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I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.
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The transaction will enable us to become a single source of integrated products and services that building owners want in order to optimize comfort and energy efficiency
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My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: i'faith, there's time for naught but bold resolves!
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I don't see how anybody starts a novel without knowing how it's going to end. I usually make detailed outlines: how many chapters it will be and so forth.
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It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.
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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.
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In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.
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not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.
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You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.
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History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant
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The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world.
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A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.
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To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.
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If you would learn a thing, straightway declare yourself a professor of it!
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Self knowledge is always bad news.
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Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.
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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.
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More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.
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Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.
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Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.
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The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.
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The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.
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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?
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Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.
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Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.
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Yet everyone begins in the same place; how is it that most go along without difficulty but a few lose their way?
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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.
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