Quotes from Donald Barthelme

...as one reads more and more and more you get more fathers in your hierarchy of fathers. And then, after summoning twenty or thirty fathers, perhaps you are born, or perhaps you are not born.

I enjoy doing layoutproblems of design. I could very cheerfully be a typographer.

There were five children. In the late thirties my father built a house for us, something not too dissimilar to Miess Tugendhat house. It was wonderful to live in but strange to see on the Texas prairie. On Sundays people used to park their cars out on the street and stare. We had a routine, the family, on Sundays. We used to get up from Sunday dinner, if enough cars had parked, and run out in front of the house in a sort of chorus line, doing high kicks.

When you improvise, do you think of the chord changes or the melody? Both. This is an interesting question which Im unable to answer adequately. If the melody is the skeleton of the particular object, then the chord changes are its wardrobe, its changes of clothes. I tend to pay rather more attention to the latter than to the former. All I want is just a trace of skeletonthree bones from which the rest may be reasoned out.

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.

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

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

Charm ... is the dead green bug on the golden leaf of occasion.

However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.

Truth ... is a hard apple, whether one is throwing it or catching it.

Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

Any fool can cry wolf; to cry sheep is inspired, the work of a subtle, contradancing mind.

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.

No man's plenum ... is impervious to the awl of God's will.

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.

Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.

You must change the people you are speaking to so that you appear, to yourself, to be still alive.

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.

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.

The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.

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

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

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Write about what you're afraid of.