Donald Barthelme

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.

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.

No man\'s plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God\'s will.

See the moon? It hates us.

Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.

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.

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.

MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.

Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don\'t count?

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.

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.

Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail.

Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.

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.

The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance.

We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of \"sense\" of what is going on. This \"sense\" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having \"completed\" them.

Self-criticism sessions were held, but these produced more criticism than could usefully be absorbed or accomodated.

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

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.

I don't think you can talk about progress in art-movement, but not progress.

His examiner said severely: \"Baskerville, you blank round, discursiveness is not literature.\" \"The aim of literature,\" Baskerville replied grandly, \"is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.\"

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).

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.

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

\"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.\"

Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.

Can the life of the time be caught in an advertisement? Is that how it is, really, in the meadows of the world?

How can you be alienated without first having been connected?

--Why are we fighting them? --They\'re mad. We\'re sane. --How do we know? --That we\'re sane? --Yes. --Am I sane? --To all appearances. --And you, do you consider yourself sane? --I do. --Well, there you have it. --But don\'t they also consider themselves sane? --I think they know. Deep down. That they\'re not sane. --How must that make them feel? --Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.

I keep wondering if, say, there is intelligent life on other planets, the scientists argue that something like two percent of the other planets have the conditions, the physical conditions, to support life in the way it happened here, did Christ visit each and every planet, go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on.