Donald Barthelme
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.Collection: Writing
The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.Collection: Heart
Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.Collection: Writing
I am never needlessly obscure - I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.Collection: Obscure
Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.Collection: Particular
The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day.Collection: Knowing
Write about what you're afraid of.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Messages
The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.Collection: Tasks
The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.Collection: Hard Work
Any genuine work of art generates new work.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Believe
How can you be alienated without first having been connected?Collection: Firsts
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.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Men
And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.Collection: Sat
Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.Collection: Giving
The death of God left the angels in a strange position.Collection: Angel
Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.Collection: World
The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.Collection: Wine
Self-criticism sessions were held, but these produced more criticism than could usefully be absorbed or accomodated.Collection: Self
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).Collection: Art
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.Collection: Girl
Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.Collection: Doubt
MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.Collection: Mtv
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.Collection: Evil
Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.Collection: Dripping
No man's plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God's will.Collection: Men
The much heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor.Collection: New York
Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.Collection: Too Much
There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Art
Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.Collection: Ifs
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.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Girl
See the moon? It hates us.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Angel
Is death that which gives meaning to life?Collection: Giving
Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.Collection: Stupidity
The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.Collection: Inspiring
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.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Mother