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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

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John Barth
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: May 27
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Cambridge
Maryland
John Simmons Barth
Things
Ought
Swim
Would
Read
Onto
Tell
Birds
Another
Miss
Two
Bird
Remember
Missing
Back
Students
Borges
Way
Teaching
Mentioning

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The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting not to change the world.
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Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.
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To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.
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Yet everyone begins in the same place how is it that most go along without difficulty but a few lose their way?
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If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.
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Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it's at that point you need coaching.
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The story of your life is not your life it's your story.
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It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.
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More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.
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He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator -- though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.
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I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.
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You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.
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Nobody knew how to be what they were right.
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If you would learn a thing, straightway declare yourself a professor of it!
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Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.
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The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.
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not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.
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Nothing is intrinsically valuable the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.
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