John Barth Quotes

Do not be afraid of mistakes. They will be with you always,every time you put a camera to your eye. [If you] shoot safe, and don't at least occasionally court disaster, you are not trying. Time to hang up the camera.

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

Art is rearranging and grouping mistakes.

One of the things I've learned is there's no lesson to be learned. You have to resign yourself to the fact that mistakes are going to be made at any time in the creative process.

I'm apologetic when I feel like I've made a mistake. And when I have done a disservice to myself or someone else. But I don't feel a need to apologize for doing or saying something that I think needs to be said, just because it may not sit comfortably with somebody else.

I love the process of cutting everything out with a scalpel yourself: I don't want to have my stencils drawn up in Illustrator, then laser-cut. I like the fact that it's slightly wrong; I think it gives it a beauty. The individual and handmade will always be worth more than what a computer can do, at least until computers can learn how to make mistakes.

...for we are all amateurs at life, but if we do not focus too much on our mistakes, a miraculous picture emerges. And we learn that it's not the beauty of the image that warrants our gratitude--it's the chance to paint.

I've been taught not to have any regrets. If we were to add up all of the hours spent regretting mistakes and use that time to develop new ideas, who knows how many brilliant new businesses would be created.

Go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.

Mistakes are lessons that you need to learn!

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

Movies which set out to be 'commercial' usually have an artificial look about them-a certain waxlike quality. They allow for no failure, no moment of mistake.

Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

Do you ever make silly mistakes? It is one of my very few creative activities.

Tell everyone that your mistakes are art. You can get away with a lot that way.

That is the trouble with many inventors; they lack patience. They lack the willingness to work a thing out slowly and clearly and sharply in their mind, so that they can actually "feel it work." They want to try their first idea right off; and the result is they use up lots of money and lots of good material, only to find eventually that they are working in the wrong direction. We all make mistakes, and it is better to make them before we begin.

You can only go forward by making mistakes. I'm twenty-seven, not fifty-seven. I'm not Givenchy, I'm Alexander McQueen.

Sometimes actors' mistakes give me ideas I can use, because mistakes are always sincere, absolutely sincere.

The technical phase can be boring because there is little opportunity for creavivity, for art. Boredom leads to complacency and mistakes.

If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?

The perosn who doesn't make mistakes is unlikely to make anything.

The only mistakes you can learn from are the ones you survive.

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.