John Barth Quotes
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Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to 'penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear,' as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated.
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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.
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This is an exciting time. A new chapter in our history.
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More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.
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Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.
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You're certain to get a decision in a trial.
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If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.
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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 Jorge Luis Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.