Donald Barthelme Quotations

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

I am never needlessly obscure I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance.

Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail.

Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.

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.

MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Is death that which gives meaning to life?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.

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.

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.

Will you be wanting to contest the divorce?" I asked Mrs. Davis. "I should think not," she said calmly, "although I suppose on of us should, for the fun of the thing. An uncontested divorce always seems to me contrary to the spirit of divorce.

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.

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.

We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having "completed" them.

Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don't count?

HENRY: 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.

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.

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.

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

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

What an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature... (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something "out there" which cannot be brought "here". This is standard. I don't mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a "successful artist" (except, of course, in worldly terms).

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.

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

See the moon? It hates us.

Write about what you're afraid of.

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.

How can you be alienated without first having been connected?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The death of God left the angels in a strange position. They were overtaken suddenly by a fundamental question. One can attempt to imagine the moment. How did they look at the instant the question invaded them, flooding the angelic consciousness, taking hold with terrifying force? The question was, "What are angels?" New to questioning, unaccustomed to terror, unskilled in aloneness, the angels (we assume) fell into despair.

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.

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.

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

[picket sign] COGITO ERGO NOTHING!....[casual passerby:] "Cogito ergo your ass"....

--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.

Any genuine work of art generates new work.

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

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.

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.