Quotes from Donald Barthelme

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.

The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

See the moon? It hates us.

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.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.

There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.

How can you be alienated without first having been connected?

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.

the thing about books is, there are quite a number you don't have to read.

I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.

Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.

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.

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

Fragments are the only forms I trust.

The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.

You are killing me." " -We? Not we. Not in any sense, we. Processes are killing you, not we. Inexorable processes.

The aim of literature," Baskerville replied grandly, "is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

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

The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude, as when you attend a funeral and notice that it's being poorly done.

How can he be killed most easily? With the fewest stains?

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.

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

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

Is death that which gives meaning to life?