JOHN BARTH QUOTES II

American author (1930- )

Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

JOHN BARTH

Lost in the Funhouse


You don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings ... serendipitously.

JOHN BARTH

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor


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

Lost in the Funhouse


Intellectual discussion, after all, is the real joy of the winter of life, when other pleasures have flown, as it were.

JOHN BARTH

The Floating Opera


The enemy you flee is not exterior to yourself.

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


Self knowledge is always bad news.

JOHN BARTH

Giles Goat-Boy


Writers in this country, particularly novelists, are likely to come to the medium through some back door. Nearly every writer I know was going to be something else, and then found himself writing by a kind of passionate default.

JOHN BARTH

The Paris Review, spring 1985


I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

JOHN BARTH

The Friday Book


It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

JOHN BARTH

The Friday Book


My imagination is most at ease with an old literary convention like the epistolary novel, or a classical myth--received melody lines, so to speak, which I then reorchestrate to my purpose.

JOHN BARTH

The Paris Review, spring 1985