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John Barth Quotes

1930–2024 United States

John Simmons Barth (May 27, 1930 – April 2, 2024) was an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.

United States
Academics
Novelists
Short story writers

Random John Barth quote

23 quotes

[O]ne does not write a truly contemporary novel … merely by writing about contemporary matters. … One writes a contemporary novel by writing it in a contemporary way.

Further Fridays (1995)

Life teaches the storyteller his themes and subject matter; literature teaches him how to get a handle on them: what has been done already, what might be done differently, what's a story anyway, and what is to be found in the existing inventory of situations, attitudes, characters, tonalities, forms, and effects accumulated over four thousand years of written literature.

Further Fridays (1995)

[T]he vocation of writing seriously involves the continuous and deep examination of one's own experience of life and the world, and of the language and literary conventions we use to register that experience and make it meaningful.

The Friday Book (1984)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John Barth (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.