To realize that nothing makes any final difference is overwhelming; but if one goes no farther and becomes a saint, a cynic or a suicide on principle, one hasn’t reasoned completely. The truth is that nothing makes any difference, including that truth. Hamlet’s question is, absolutely, meaningless.

— John Barth

John Barth Quotes

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

— John Barth

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

— John Barth

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

— John Barth

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.

— John Barth

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

— John Barth

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

— John Barth

Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

— John Barth

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 the very things that made him precious to her... and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.

— John Barth

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

— John Barth

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.

— John Barth

Love it is that drives and sustains us!′ I translate: we don’t know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us.

— John Barth

Intellectual discussion, after all, is the real joy of the winter of life, when other pleasures have flown, as it were.

— John Barth

So, I begin each day with a gesture of cynicism, and close it with a gesture of faith; or, if you prefer, begin it by reminding myself that, for me at least, goals and objectives are without value, and close it by demonstrating that the fact is irrelevant. A gesture of temporality, a gesture of eternity. It is in the tension between these two gestures that I have lived my adult life.

— John Barth

It’s not difficult to be encyclopedic in a work of fiction; it’s damned difficult to be encyclopedic, I suppose, in truth.

— John Barth

That clever folk care less for what ye think than why ye think it.

— John Barth

To realize that nothing makes any final difference is overwhelming; but if one goes no farther and becomes a saint, a cynic or a suicide on principle, one hasn’t reasoned completely. The truth is that nothing makes any difference, including that truth. Hamlet’s question is, absolutely, meaningless.

— John Barth

What a sentence, everything was wrong from the outset.

— John Barth

Innocence is like youth,′ he declared sadly, ’which is given to us only to expend and takes its very meaning from its loss.

— John Barth

On our planet, sir, males and females copulate. Moreover, they enjoy copulating. But for various reasons they cannot do this whenever, wherever, and with whomever they choose. Hence all this running around that you observe. Hence the world.

— John Barth

When you’re lost, the smartest thing to do is stay put till you’re found, hollering if necessary.

— John Barth
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