Donald Barthelme Quotes

80 Sourced Quotes

Doubt is a necessary precondition to meaningful action.

Donald Barthelme
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.

Donald Barthelme
But I think everyone should have a little philosophy, Thomas said. It helps, a little. It helps. It is good. It is about half as good as music.

Donald Barthelme
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
Try to be a man about whom nothing is known, our father said, when we were young. Our father said several other interesting things, but we have forgotten what they were. Keep quiet, he said. That we remember. He wished more quiet. One tends to want that, in a National Park. Our father was a man about whom nothing was known. Nothing is known about him still. He gave us the recipes. He was not very interesting. A tree is more interesting. A suitcase is more interesting. A canned good is more interesting. When we sing the father hymn, we notice that he was not very interesting. The words of the hymn notice it. It is explictly commented upon, in the text.

Donald Barthelme
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
As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven't heard of some of them.

Donald Barthelme
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.

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

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

Donald Barthelme
The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.

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

Donald Barthelme
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
True dragons are Danish and speak Danish, a tongue that the Danes themselves describe as less a language than a throat disease. To attract a dragon, one chains a naked maiden to a rock. The maiden must be chained to the rock in such a way that every part of her is visible to the dragon. Many famous paintings demonstrate the technique; Ingres's Angelica Saved by Ruggiero is an example. After the dragon has inspected your maiden to its heart's content, you issue one of the conventional formal challenges, in Danish—'Jeg udfordre dig til ridderlig camp' is the way one usually puts it—and then the fight begins.

Donald Barthelme
Well chaps first I'd like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it.

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.

Donald Barthelme
The actors feel that the music played before the curtain rises will put the audience in the wrong mood. The playwright suggests that the (purposefully lugubrious) music be played at twice-speed. This peps it up somewhat while retaining its essentially dark and gloomy character. The actors listen carefully, and are pleased.

Donald Barthelme
Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.

Donald Barthelme
I am never needlessly obscure—I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.

Donald Barthelme
My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby's almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.
My wife has been wanting a dog for a long time. I have had to be the one to tell her that she couldn't have one. But now the baby wants a dog, my wife says. This may be true. The baby is very close to my wife. They go around together all the time, clutching each other tightly. I ask the baby, who is a girl, Whose girl are you? Are you Daddy's girl? The baby says, Momma, and she doesn't just say it once, she says it repeatedly, Momma momma momma. I don't see why I should buy a hundred-dollar dog for that damn baby.

Donald Barthelme
The new thing, a great banality in white, off-white and poor-white, leaned up against the wall. Interesting, we said. It's poor, Snow White said. Poor, poor. Yes, Paul said, one of my poorer things I think. Not so poor of course as yesterday's, poorer on the other hand than some, she said. Yes, Paul said, it has some of the qualities of poorness. Especially poor in the lower left-hand corner, she said. Yes, Paul said, I would go so far as to hurl it into the marketplace. They're getting poorer, she said. Poorer and poorer, Paul said with satisfaction, descending to unexplored depths of poorness where no human intelligence has ever been. … Sublimely poor, she murmured. Wallpaper, he said.

Donald Barthelme
"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
I believed 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
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
The ultimate meaning of the angry young man is not known. What is known is the shape of his greatest fear—that all of his efforts, from learning to speak to learning to write, to write well, to write badly, to write angrily, from learning to despise to learning to abominate, to abominate well, to abominate badly, to abominate abominably, to rant, to fulminate, to shout down the sea, to age, to age graefully, to age awkwardly, to age at all, to think, to regret, to list himself in the newspapers under Lost and Found, might culminate precisely in this: a roaring, raging, crazy mad passionate bibliography.

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

Donald Barthelme
Oh, there is nothing better than intelligent conversation except thrashing about in bed with a naked girl and Egmont Light Italic.

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

Donald Barthelme
Being merciless, while not exactly easy, is finally a job like any other. It's theater. It's got nothing to do with my private life. Still, sometimes when I used to yell at my kids, I wondered if I was maybe... putting a little too much into it. They're grown now, so the question is moot. They seem OK. Roderick is at Harvard and Betsy is married and has a couple of kids of her own.

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

Donald Barthelme