About John Barth: John Simmons Barth is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictional quality of his work.
Secrets, however long they are kept, usually still manage to be brought to light. The best you can hope for is that you’ll be in control of when a secret gets out, not if it does.” -Melody in CHIMERA-
The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, o...
Good Samaritans: Truth, justice and the American way–for them it wasn't only a comic book code; it was a way of life. it was admirable, courageous, and inconvenient as shit. -Stefan, CHIMERA
There's a great difficulty in making choices if you have any imagination at all. Faced with such a multitude of desireable choices, no one choice seems satisfactory for very long by comparison with the aggregate desirability of all the rest, though c...
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 subt...
The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watc...
Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact...
Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn't true. I'm not aware of myse...
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 basenes...
More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.
This is an exciting time. A new chapter in our history.
The Bible is not man's word about God, but God's word about man.
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.
You're certain to get a decision in a trial.
Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.
Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.
His head always felt about to ache, but never began to.
