Donald Barthelme Quotes
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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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The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day.
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Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.
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Write about what you're afraid of.
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The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
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I am never needlessly obscure - I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
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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.
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I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
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How can you be alienated without first having been connected?
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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.
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"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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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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Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
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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.
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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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Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
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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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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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No man's plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God's will.
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The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance.
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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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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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The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.
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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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The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.
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Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.
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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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Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don't count?
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I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.
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Any genuine work of art generates new work.
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