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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
Back
Students
Borges
Way
Teaching
Mentioning
Things
Ought
Swim
Would
Read
Onto
Tell
Birds
Another
Miss
Two
Bird
Remember
Missing

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It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.
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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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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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not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.
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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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I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.
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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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More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.
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If you would learn a thing, straightway declare yourself a professor of it!
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