John Barth

“You don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings... serendipitously.”

“The process is the content.”

“Reality is a fiction with a plot.”

“Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what you have to.”

“The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction.”

“The truth is that we are all from outer space.”

“I don't know which is more difficult: going on alone to the end, or stopping when one is not alone.”

“Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.”

“The key to the treasure is the treasure.”

“Self-knowledge is always bad news.”

“More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.”

“Everyone is the hero of his own story.”

“The story of your life is not your life. It is your story.”

“All tales are at least in part-true, if only in that they are told.”

“If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is reinvent the world. God, after all, only created it once.”