Top 100 Donald Barthelme Quotes

#1. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #7432
#2. How can he be killed most easily? With the fewest stains?

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #34875
#3. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #42520
#4. Fragments are the only forms I trust.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #68479
#5. You get Kandinsky, a bad mother, all them pick-up-sticks pictures ...

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #88631
#6. You came and fell upon me, I was sitting in the wicker chair. The wicker exclaimed as your weight fell upon me. You were light, I thought, and I thought how good it was of you to do this. We'd never touched before.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #118322
#7. All of us ... still believe that the American flag betokens a kind of general righteousness. But I say ... that signs are signs and some of them are lies.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #119961
#8. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #158899
#9. Of course we did everything right, insofar as we were able to imagine what "right" was.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #180438
#10. The daughters are tired of kissing each other, although some are not.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #187280
#11. Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #188726
#12. Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #196045
#13. 97. I approached the symbol, with its layers of meaning, but when I touched it, it changed into only a beautiful princess.
98. I threw the beautiful princess headfirst down the mountain to my acquaintances.
99. Who could be relied upon to deal with her.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #197844
#14. Pia was chopping up an enormous cabbage, a cabbage big as a basketball. The cabbage was of an extraordinary size. It was a big cabbage. "That's a big cabbage," Edward said. "Big," Pia said.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #215316
#15. They were heading I judged for the Sixth Precinct. Had I had the black hat with me, and sufficient men and horses and lariats and .30-30s, and popular support from the masses and a workable revolutionary ideology and/or a viable myth pattern, I would have rescued them.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #218179
#16. And Harold came into Perpetua's apartment.
He said, 'I just want to know one thing. Are you happy?' 'Sure,' Perpetua said. (Donald Barthelme, "Perpetua")

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #222281
#17. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #252224
#18. I sit down on the curb, outside the Opera. People passing look at me. I will wait here for a hundred years. Or until the hot meat of romance is cooled by the dull gravy of common sense once more

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #263779
#19. There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #271213
#20. Art is a meditation upon external reality rather than a representation of external reality

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #300818
#21. Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #313214
#22. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #342530
#23. A hundred canes shattered in the sun, like a load of antihistamines falling out of an airplane.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #360051
#24. Machines are braver than art.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #366979
#25. Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #432639
#26. Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #475565
#27. And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #532732
#28. How can you be alienated without first having been connected?

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #543668
#29. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #558895
#30. The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #595957
#31. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #601963
#32. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #611483
#33. Your father and I were in the trenches together, in the Great War. That was a war all right. Oh I know there have been other wars since, better-publisized ones, more expensive ones perhaps, but our war is the one I'll always remember. Our war is the one that means war to me.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #619500
#34. A process of accretion. Barnacles growing on a wreck or a rock. I'd rather have a wreck than a ship that sails. Things attach themselves to wrecks. Strange fish find your wreck or rock to be a good feeding ground; after a while you've got a situation with possibilities.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #837528
#35. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #847241
#36. See the moon? It hates us.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #851417
#37. MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #859970
#38. [picket sign] COGITO ERGO NOTHING! ... [casual passerby:] "Cogito ergo your ass" ...

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #877519
#39. No man's plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God's will.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #891356
#40. It is possible of course that there are no more real men here, on his ball of half-truths, the earth.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #921460
#41. Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught - prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #934743
#42. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #986489
#43. I am never needlessly obscure I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1037210
#44. Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1049907
#45. The mind carries you with it, away from what you are supposed to do, toward things that cannot be explained rationally, toward difficulty, lack of clarity, late-afternoon light.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1078813
#46. I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1086394
#47. Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1103976
#48. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1123766
#49. All men that are ruined are ruined on the side of their natural propensities, the note concludes.
This is surely true. Yet the vivacity with which he embraces ruin is unexampled, in my experience.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1131709
#50. But we little know until tried how much of the uncontrollable there is in us, urging across glaciers and torrents, and up dangerous heights, let the judgement forbid as it may.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1134738
#51. How old are you Hogo." "Thirty-five Jane. A not unpleasant age to be." "You don't mind then. That you are not young." "It has its buggy aspects as what does not?" "You don't mind then that you are sagging in the direction of death." "No, Jane.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1136692
#52. The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1136698
#53. There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1141582
#54. Truth, as Bergson knew, is a hard apple, whether one is throwing it or catching it.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1161740
#55. Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1175558
#56. Immature citizens in several sizes were massed before a large factorylike structure where advanced techniques transformed them into true-thinking right-acting members of the three social classes, lower, middle, and upper middle.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1194130
#57. The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism, but what I had done was assume an attitude -melancholy sadness- toward it.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1239076
#58. The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day ...

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1240169
#59. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1244260
#60. The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1272141
#61. The trouble with capturing one is that that original gesture is almost impossible to equal or improve upon.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1302637
#62. Little is known about her. We are assured, however, that the same damnable involvements that obsess us obsess her too. Copulation. Strangeness. Applause.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1303000
#63. -You are killing me."
" -We? Not we. Not in any sense, we. Processes are killing you, not we. Inexorable processes.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1309724
#64. The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1334017
#65. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1340847
#66. Write about what you're afraid of.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1344820
#67. Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1358446
#68. never figured out what sort of animal I was

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1373128
#69. Dun-colored fathers tend to shy at obstacles, and therefore you do not want a father of this color, because life, in one sense, is nothing but obstacles, and his continual shying will reduce your nerves to grease.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1379443
#70. It seemed to proclaim itself a mystery, but one there was no point in solving - an ongoing low-grade mystery.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1406879
#71. Fathers are teachers of the true and not-true, and no father ever knowingly teaches what is not true. In a cloud of unknowing, then, the father proceeds with his instruction.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1411779
#72. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1417250
#73. We regarded each other sitting around the breakfast table with its big cardboard boxes of "Fear," "Chix," and "Rats.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1417546
#74. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1421860
#75. Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1453684
#76. Nothing like a suck of the breast.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1468108
#77. The important thing is the educational experience itself - how to survive it.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1481663
#78. Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1484295
#79. This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1521868
#80. The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1533032
#81. Our becoming is done.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1539001
#82. The writer is [ ... ] the work's way of getting itself written

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1543670
#83. There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1558722
#84. I spoke to Sylvia. Do you think this is a good life?

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1586146
#85. Any genuine work of art generates new work.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1597516
#86. Three rebellions ago, the air was fresher. The soft pasting noises of the rebel billposters remind us of Oklahoma, where everything is still the same.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1616221
#87. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1642101
#88. It is a curiosity of writing about angels that, very often, one turns out to be writing about men.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1648718
#89. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1659213
#90. The world in the evening seems fraught with the absence of promise, if you are a married man. There is nothing to do but go home and drink your nine drinks and forget about it.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1677749
#91. The present goal of the individual
in group enterprises is to avoid dominance; leadership is felt to be a character disorder.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1684617
#92. Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. They've been a laboratory for everybody.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1686777
#93. The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1707244
#94. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1725199
#95. 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

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1746791
#96. Have you noticed the weather? asked Thomas. All turned to look for the weather.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1750177
#97. The combinatory agility of words," he wrote in "Not-Knowing," "the exponential generation of meaning once they're allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven't yet encountered.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1754836
#98. The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude, as when you attend a funeral and notice that it's being poorly done.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1839992
#99. mead for my men!

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1842174
#100. Well, what shall I do next? What is the next thing demanded of me by history?

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme Quotes #1870761

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