Donald Barthelme Quotes

Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.

He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it... he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice.

Faint equivalents can sometimes be found ... . Or it can be rendered obliquely-an adolescent's mental image of his or her parents making love, which must be something on the order of crocodiles mating.

Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas. Another day, another dollar. Each man is valued at what he will bring in the marketplace. Meaning has been drained from work and assigned instead to remuneration.

Now, here is the point about the self: it is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuff full.

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.

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.

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 task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.

I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.

Is death that which gives meaning to life?

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.

See the moon? It hates us.

There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.

The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.

The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.

Write about what you're afraid of.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love...And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.

The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.

--Why are we fighting them? --They're mad. We're sane. --How do we know? --That we're sane? --Yes. --Am I sane? --To all appearances. --And you, do you consider yourself sane? --I do. --Well, there you have it. --But don't they also consider themselves sane? --I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane. --How must that make them feel? --Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.

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.

The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.

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.

Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.

The much heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

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.

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.

How can you be alienated without first having been connected?

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.

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.

There is no moment that exceeds in beauty that moment when one looks at a woman and finds that she is looking at you in the same way that you are looking at her. The moment in which she bestows that look that says, "Proceed with your evil plan, sumbitch.

The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.

The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.

Any genuine work of art generates new work.

I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.