Donald Barthelme Quotes
40 quotes
in 442 categories
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Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
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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 don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.
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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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The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.
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I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
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Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.
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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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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…
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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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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…
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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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Any genuine work of art generates new work.
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The much heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor.
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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…
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Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.
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Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
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The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.
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The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
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