Donald Barthelme Quotes

40 quotes in 442 categories

• Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
• The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.
• Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.
• I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.
• The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day...
• The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.
• I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
• Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.
• Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
• 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…
• Is death that which gives meaning to life?
• 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…
• 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.
• Any genuine work of art generates new work.
• The much heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor.
• 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…
• Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.
• Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
• The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.
• The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.

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