John Barth > Quotes

“In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.”
― John Barth

“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.”
― John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

“Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.”
― John Barth

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

“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.”
― John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

“not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.”
― John Barth

“Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.”
― John Barth

“Nobody knew how to be what they were right. ”
― John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

“For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion. ”
― John Barth

“It’s easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.”
― John Barth, The Friday Book

“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!”
― John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor

“... a man's most useful friend and fearsome foe is the poet.”
― John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor

“Articulation! There, by Joe, was MY absolute, if I could be said to have one. At any rate, it is the only thing I can think of about which I ever had, with any frequency at all, the feelings one usually has for one's absolutes. 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.”
― John Barth, The End of the Road

“All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.”
― John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor

“...that language may be a compound code, and that the discovery of an enormous complexity beneath a simple surface may well be more dismaying than delightful. E.g.: the maze of termite tunnels in your joist, the intricate cancer in her perfect breast, the psychopathology of everyday life, the Auschwitz in an anthill casually DDT'd by a child, the rage of atoms in a drop of ink - in short, anything examined curiously enough.”
― John Barth

“May I recommend three Maryland beaten biscuits, with water, for your breakfast? They are hard as a haul-seiner's conscience and dry as a dredger's tongue, and they sit for hours in your morning stomach like ballast on a tender ship's keel. They cost little, are easily and crumblessly carried in your pockets, and if forgotten and gone stale, are neither harder nor less palatable than when fresh. What's more, eaten first thing in the morning and followed by a cigar, they put a crabberman's thirst on you, such that all the water in a deep neap tide can't quench --- and none, I think, denies the charms of water on the bowels of morning? ”
― John Barth, The Floating Opera

“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?”
― John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor

“I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.”
― John Barth