JOHN BARTH

You're certain to get a decision in a trial.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

The Bible is not man's word about God, but God's word about man.

This is an exciting time. A new chapter in our history.

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.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

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.

If you would learn a thing, straightway declare yourself a professor of it!

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

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

Self knowledge is always bad news.

All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.

Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

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.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Choosing is existence. To the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist.

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

My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: i'faith, there's time for naught but bold resolves!

It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.

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To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.

The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.

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