History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant John Barth More Quotes by John Barth More Quotes From John Barth Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes. John Barth loathingself-loathingself The story of your life is not your life; it's your story. John Barth life-isstories Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people. John Barth valuesvaluablepeople In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity. John Barth skillsdoeart Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. John Barth herostoriessports I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated. John Barth talentsimplecomplicated The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world. John Barth writingworldinteresting 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 betrayalwritingmen 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. John Barth sleepphilosophyart Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene. John Barth generationssceneartist Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state. John Barth stateskindwriting Self knowledge is always bad news. John Barth self-knowledgenewsself The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' - by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love. John Barth readinglovemean Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn. John Barth tuitionlife A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth. John Barth knowingwritingyears Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it's at that point you need coaching. John Barth coachingmistakeneeds My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: i'faith, there's time for naught but bold resolves! John Barth menpastthinking Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back. John Barth monsoonsshipssometimes More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations. John Barth politicalsecrethistory 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. John Barth chaptersknowingends
