114 Quotes by John Barth

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.

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.

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

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.

Yet everyone begins in the same place; how is it that most go along without difficulty but a few lose their way?

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.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.