John Barth
John Barth
John Simmons Barthis an American writer, best known for his postmodernist and metafictional fiction...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth27 May 1930
CountryUnited States of America
girl simple civilization
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.
secret wish lovers
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.
Nobody knew how to be what they were right.
hero boys thrown
not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.
teaching two bird
One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.
existence
Choosing is existence. To the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist,
may stones matter
It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.
opinion horror
The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.
lions world innocence
Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.
art technique easier
It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.
love reading mean
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.
writing years knowing
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.
art mean men
Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.
serendipity good-faith elsewhere
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.