114 Quotes by John Barth

I long ago learned that one's illnesses are both pleasanter and more useful if one keeps their exact nature to himself: one's friends, uncertain as to the cause of one's queer behavior and strange sufferings, impute to one a mysteriousness often subtly convenient.

…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.” ---The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

His head always felt about to ache, but never began to.

I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me’s no joke.

The necessity for an observer makes perfect observation impossible.

¿Cómo se escribe una novela? ¿Cómo encontrar el canal, perdido en tantos arroyos y lagunas? La narración no es mi ocupación favorita; no es la de muchos; mi argumento no se eleva y desciende en significativas etapas, sino que se enrosca sobre sí mismo como la concha de un buccino o las serpientes del caduceo de Hermes: disgresa, retrocede, duda, gime desde sus entrañas, etcétera, se derrumba, muere.

And never mind that the lessons he meant to be helpful, his students always make people miserable with, and flunk anybody that disagrees with them!

BLAM! BLOOEY!Twin thunderstorms struck Chesapeake Bay at about the same hour two weeks apart in the last spring and summer of the eighth decade of the twentieth century of the Christian era and bracketed our story like artillery zeroing in.

Others live for the lie of love; Echo lives for her lovely lies, loves for their livening.