Best 87 quotes of Donald Barthelme on MyQuotes

Donald Barthelme

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

    Any genuine work of art generates new work.

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

    Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.

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    Donald Barthelme

    Can the life of the time be caught in an advertisement? Is that how it is, really, in the meadows of the world?

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

    Capitalism places every man in competition with his fellows for a share of the available wealth. A few people accumulate big piles, but most do not. The sense of community falls victim to this struggle.

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

    His examiner said severely: "Baskerville, you blank round, discursiveness is not literature." "The aim of literature," Baskerville replied grandly, "is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

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    Donald Barthelme

    "How does one conquer fear, Don B.?" "One takes a frog and sews it to one's shoe," he said. "The left or the right?" Don B. gave me a pitying look. "Well, you'd look mighty funny going down the street with only one frog sewed to your shoes, wouldn't you?" he said. "One frog on each shoe.

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

    I don't believe that we are what we do although many thinkers argue otherwise. I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are -- an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality. Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew.

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

    I keep wondering if, say, there is intelligent life on other planets, the scientists argue that something like two percent of the other planets have the conditions, the physical conditions, to support life in the way it happened here, did Christ visit each and every planet, go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on.

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    Donald Barthelme

    Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

    "I smell fennel," Launcelot said. "That reminds me, I should tell you I have discovered a specific for maims. You take salt, good-quality river mud, and bee urine, and slather it on the maim and hold it there for two days. Works like a charm. Gathering the bee urine is a bit of a bore.

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

    It is difficult to keep the public interested. The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders. Often we don't know where our next marvel is coming from. The supply of strange ideas is not endless.

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

    MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

    Naked girls with the heads of Marx and Malraux prone and helpless in the glare of the headlights, tried to give them a little joie de vivre but maybe it didn't take, their constant bickering and smallness, it's like a stroke of lightning, the world reminds you of its power, tracheotomies right and left, I am spinning, my pretty child, don't scratch, pick up your feet, the long nights, spent most of my time listening, this is a test of the system, this is only a test.

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    Donald Barthelme

    No man's plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God's will.

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

    Now it is necessary to court her, and win her, and put on this clean dressing gown, and cut my various nails, and drink something that will kill the millions of germs in my mouth, and say something flattering, and be witty and bonny, and hale and kinky, all just to ease this wrinkle in the groin. It seems a high price.

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

    Self-criticism sessions were held, but these produced more criticism than could usefully be absorbed or accomodated.

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    Donald Barthelme

    Some people', Miss R. said,'run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

    Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out.

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

    The center will not hold if it has been spot-welded by an operator whose deepest concern is not with the weld but with his lottery ticket.

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

    The question so often asked of modern painting, "What is it?", contains more than the dull skepticism of the man who is not going to have the wool pulled over his eyes. It speaks of a fundamental placement in relation to the work, that of a voyager in the world coming upon a strange object. The reader reconstitutes the work by his active participation, by approaching the object, tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within. It is characteristic of the object that it does not declare itself all at once, in a rush of pleasant naïveté.

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    Donald Barthelme

    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.

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    Donald Barthelme

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

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    Donald Barthelme

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