John Barth Quotes

Words are often seen hunting for an idea, but ideas are never seen hunting for words.

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.

In ways I don't entirely have the words for, an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down.

For me, writing is a way of thinking. I write in a journal a lot. I'm a very impatient person, so writing and meditation allow me to slow down and watch my mind; they are containers that keep me in place, hold me still.

In order for sensation to accede to the objectivity of things, it must itself be changed into a thing. The agent of change is language: the sensations are turned into verbal objects.

Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words.

I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.

Writing is a type of therapy for me. I'm always trying to break down what happened, and why I felt a certain way.

I've always felt an overwhelming need to get out what was inside. The vehicle for me was words on paper - not speech, not art, not dance, not anything else.

My only way of processing anything for me is by writing.

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

It is amazing how much a thought expands and refines by being put into speech: I should think it could hardly know itself.

Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond.

Suppose we think while we talk or write--I mean, as we normally do--we shall not in general say that we think quicker than we talk, but the thought seems not to be separate from the expression.

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.

The description is not the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you are caught up in the description, as most people are, then you will never see the mountain

If writing has taught me anything, it's that you don't actually understand anything until you can express it in words.

Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

I wasn't disciplined at all. As good of an athlete as I was, I was not disciplined. Had I had the drive that I have in comedy, and acting, and writing, that's why I knew it just wasn't right for me.

Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life.

The young people have a phrase for this now, which is "slay in your lane." That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.

You try to learn who you are. You work hard. You've either got it or you don't when it comes to writing books. And you tend to only get these things if you want them, and want them to the exclusion of everything else.

When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come through from somewhere else.