1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. John Barth

John Barth Quotes

John Simmons Barth is an American writer who is best known for his postmodernist and metafictional fiction.



Wikipedia  

✵ 27. May 1930  •  Other names جان بارت, ჯონ ბართი, जॉन बार्थ, جون بارث
John Barth photo

Works

The Floating Opera
John Barth: 8 quotes2 likes

Famous John Barth Quotes

“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.”

John Barth book The Floating Opera

The Floating Opera (1956)

“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.”

John Barth

Boston Sunday Globe, C7 (2 Nov 2008)

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

John Barth

“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

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

John Barth

“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.”

John Barth

Night-sea Journey
Lost In the Funhouse (1968)

“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?”

John Barth book Sabbatical: A Romance

Source: Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), p. 37

Similar authors

Frank Herbert photo
Frank Herbert158
American writer None
William Saroyan photo
William Saroyan190
American writer None
Ray Bradbury photo
Ray Bradbury401
American writer None
William Faulkner photo
William Faulkner214
American writer None
Julio Cortázar photo
Julio Cortázar29
Argentinian writer None
David Foster Wallace photo
David Foster Wallace185
American fiction writer and essayist None
Pearl S. Buck photo
Pearl S. Buck95
American writer None
Charles Bukowski photo
Charles Bukowski555
American writer None
Joseph Campbell photo
Joseph Campbell140
American mythologist, writer and lecturer None
Dale Carnegie photo
Dale Carnegie98
American writer and lecturer None