John Barth Quotes

“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 [Jorge Luis] Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.”

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

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

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

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

“The nightsea 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.”

“Marylin Marsh, who had about 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 reciprocal atrocities in the Guerra Civil - that the sunny Spanish could never be guilty of an Auschwitz, for example. In the first place, your ovens would have died, like our kitchen stove, instead of your Jews, whom you'd got rid of anyhow in the sunny Fifteenth century, no? And in the second place the whole idea of extermination camps would've been too impersonal for your exquisite Moorish tastes. Much more agradable to push folks off a cliff one at a time into a gorgeous Mediterranean sunset, as you did near Malaga - three hundred, was it, or three thousand? Or to rape and then kill a convent-full of nuns in the manner of the saint of their choice - was that Barcelona or Valencia?”