American author (1930- )
In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.
JOHN BARTH
attributed, Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth
Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay.
JOHN BARTH
The End of the Road
Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.
JOHN BARTH
Giles Goat-Boy
People still fall in love, and out, yes, in and out, and out and in, and they please each other, and hurt each other, isn't that the truth, and they do these things in more or less conventionally dramatic fashion, unfashionable or not, go on, I'm going, and what goes on between them is still not only the most interesting but the most important thing in the bloody murderous world.
JOHN BARTH
Lost in the Funhouse
Path's should be laid where people walk, instead of walking where paths are laid.
JOHN BARTH
The End of the Road
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
The Floating Opera
Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.
JOHN BARTH
attributed, Writers Dreaming
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.
JOHN BARTH
Lost in the Funhouse
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
I came from a fairly unsophisticated family from the rural, southern Eastern Shore of Maryland--which is very “deep South” in its ethos. I went to a mediocre public high school (which I enjoyed), fell into a good university on a scholarship, and then had to learn, from scratch, that civilization existed, that literature had been going on. That kind of innocence is the reverse of the exquisite sophistication with which a writer like Vladimir Nabokov comes to the medium--knowing it already, as if he’s been in on the conversation since it began. Yet the innocence that writers like myself have to overcome, if it doesn’t ruin us altogether, can become a sort of strength. You’re not intimidated by your distinguished predecessors, the great literary dead. You have a chutzpah in your approach to the medium that may carry you through those apprentice days when nobody’s telling you you’re any good because you aren’t yet.
JOHN BARTH
The Paris Review, spring 1985
The difference here 'twixt simple and witty folk, if the truth be known, is that your plain man cares much for what stand ye take and not a fart for why ye take it, while your smart wight leaves ye whate'er stand ye will, sobeit ye defend it cleverly.
JOHN BARTH
The Sot-Weed Factor
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
Not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.
JOHN BARTH
attributed, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.
JOHN BARTH
attributed, Words from the Wise
There was some simple, radical difference about him. He hoped it was genius, feared it was madness, devoted himself to amiability and inconspicuousness.
JOHN BARTH
Lost in the Funhouse
The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?
JOHN BARTH
Lost in the Funhouse
If I have yet to join the hosts of the suicides, it is because (fatigue apart) I find it no meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming.
JOHN BARTH
Lost in the Funhouse
Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.
JOHN BARTH
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.
JOHN BARTH
The Sot-Weed Factor
The house of fiction has many windows ... sometimes such a simple thing as suggesting to a student that perhaps realism instead of fantasy may be a more sympathetic genre, or humor instead of the opposite, or the novel rather than the short story--sometimes a simple suggestion like that can be the one that makes things click.
JOHN BARTH
The Paris Review, spring 1985