John Barth

"Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to “penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear,” as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated."

"The world is everything that is the case, and what the case is is not a matter of logic."

"The nightsea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a shore that may not exist and couldn't be reached if it did."

"Marylin Marsh, who had about it with Spain, declared to him But it redounds to your national credit, the then Missus Turner went on in effect - she'd been reading up on reciprocal atrocities in the Gu…"

"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'…"