Donald Barthelme Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Write about what you're afraid of.

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

Any genuine work of art generates new work.

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.

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.

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.

How can you be alienated without first having been connected?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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).

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