Donald Barthelme Quotes
I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.
The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.
The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.
Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.
The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.
We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.
Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.
Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
Can the life of the time be caught in an advertisement? Is that how it is, really, in the meadows of the world?
The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance.
Goals incapable of attainment have driven many a man to despair, but despair is easier to get to than that -- one need merely look out of the window, for example.
The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day.
Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out.
Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.
Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail.
People always like to hear that they're under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they'd feel if they were told they weren't under stress.
Well chaps first I'd like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it.
Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.
As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven't heard of some of them.
The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.
Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.
Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. Theyve been a laboratory for everybody.
There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.
Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don't count?
Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.
One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.
