Skip to content

Quotes from The Friday Book — John Barth

1930–2024 United States

← All quotes by John Barth

5 quotes

I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

The Friday Book (1984)

We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them.

The Friday Book (1984)

I don't think it's a good idea, as a rule, for artists to explain their art, even if they can. Jorge Luis Borges puts it arrogantly: God shouldn't stoop to theology. A modern painter put it more politely and poetically: Birds have no need of ornithology.

The Friday Book (1984)

Consider that if the novelist is like God and a novel like the universe, then the converse ought to have at least some some metaphorical truth: The universe is a novel; God is a novelist! (I have observed elsewhere that the trouble with God is not that He's a bad novelist; only that He's a realistic one, and that dates Him.) [Footnote:] But also keeps bringing Him back into fashion.

The Friday Book (1984)

[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.