Donald Barthelme famous quotes

See the moon? It hates us.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Hate #Moon

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Writing #Knowing #Doe

Any genuine work of art generates new work.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Art #Genuine #Works Of Art

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

#Heart #Fur #Literature

How can you be alienated without first having been connected?
-- Donald Barthelme

#Firsts #Connected

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

#Angel #Strange #Position

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Messages

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

#Found #Worst #Elusive

Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.
-- Donald Barthelme

#World #Adequate #Response

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

#Doe #Tasks #Crafts

Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Food #Golden #Existence

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

#Wine #Class #Whiskey

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Believe #Wife #Made

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Sat

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

#Stupidity #Done #Succeed

--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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Fighting #Thinking #Order

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Powerful #Mad #Insane

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Evil #Looks #Way

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

#Home #White #Snow

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Art #Thinking #Progress

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Book #Reading #White

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

#Men

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Believe #Action #Arguing

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Self #World #Mouths

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

#Self #Criticism #Self Criticism

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

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

#Dripping #Instant Gratification #Instant

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Witty #Cutting #Winning

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

#Divorce #Thinking #Sticks

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Shoes #Frogs #Doe

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Two #Rivers #Smell

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Stress #Feel Better #People

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Fun #Divorce #Thinking

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Tickets #Spots #Lottery Ticket

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Girl #Children #Night

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

#Strong #Fiction #Facts

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Work #Men #Dollars

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Success #Common #Achieve

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#War #World #Formal

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

#New York #Mayors

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Art #Moving #Knowing

Is death that which gives meaning to life?
-- Donald Barthelme

#Giving #Meaning Life

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Mother #Father #Drama

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

#Giving #Life Is #Said

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

#Thinking #Cities #Nervous

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

#Educational #Important

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

#Knowing #The End Of The Day #Way

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

#Art #Thinking #Progress

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

#Particular

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Firsts #Enjoy #Chaps

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Men #Goal #Despair

Write about what you're afraid of.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Writing

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

#Art #Wish #Difficult

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

#Tasks #Problem #Solve

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

#Hard Work #Self #Ingenuity

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

#Prayer #Writing #Editing

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...
-- Donald Barthelme

#Intelligent #Garden #Agony

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

#Ass #Casual #Passerby

Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Too Much #Anticipation #Possibility

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Angel #Despair #Looks

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

#World #Advertising #Meadows

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

#World #Sagging #Shrinking

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Book #Writing #People

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Art #Moving #Errors

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).
-- Donald Barthelme

#Art #Reading #Mean

I am never needlessly obscure I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Obscure

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

#Artist #Doe #Failing

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

#Doubt #Action #Ends

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Running #People #Missing

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Ideas #Demand #Next

MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Mtv #Forever #Surrealism

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Eye #Men #Roaring

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Struggle #Fall #Men

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.
-- Donald Barthelme

#Heart #Fur #Literature