John Simmons Barth (/bɑːrθ/; born May 27, 1930) is an American writer, best known for his postmodernist and metafictional fiction.
Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.
Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.
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.
Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.
In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.
Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.
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.
Nobody knew how to be what they were right.
It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.
Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.
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.
Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.
Choosing is existence. To the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist.
The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.
The Bible is not man's word about God, but God's word about man.
not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.
It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.
If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.
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.
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.