American author (1930- )
Nobody knew how to be what they were right.
JOHN BARTH
Lost in the Funhouse
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
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
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