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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.

— John Barth Further Fridays (1995)

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More quotes by John Barth

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

The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

When a place is central to a good writer's imagination, it is because that place has become a metaphor for larger concerns.

introductory note (1984)

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

The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

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)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Barth (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.