114 Quotes by John Barth

Love it is that drives and sustains us!′ I translate: we don’t know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us.

History – an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant.

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.

Tis e’er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.

It’s not difficult to be encyclopedic in a work of fiction; it’s damned difficult to be encyclopedic, I suppose, in truth.

It’s easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

That clever folk care less for what ye think than why ye think it.

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.

To realize that nothing makes any final difference is overwhelming; but if one goes no farther and becomes a saint, a cynic or a suicide on principle, one hasn’t reasoned completely. The truth is that nothing makes any difference, including that truth. Hamlet’s question is, absolutely, meaningless.