"The difference ‘twixt poet and coxcomb is precisely that the latter stops gaps like a ship fitter caulking seams, merely to keep the boat afloat, while the former doth his work as doth a man with a ma..."
- John Barth
"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, polymor..."
"Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene."
"Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling hadone all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years aBarrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty aSoldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fi..."
"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 no..."
"people still fall in love, and out, yes, in and out, and out and in, and they please each other, and hurt each other, isn't that the truth, and they do these things in more or less conventionally dram..."
"There's a great difficulty in makingchoices if you have any imagination at all. Faced with such a multitude of desireable choices, no one choiceseems satisfactory for very long by comparison with the ..."
"In life,” he said, “there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life ..."
"Now many crises in people’s lives occur because the hero role that they’ve assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or–the same thing in ef..."