Quotes from Donald Barthelme

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.

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

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

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

Any genuine work of art generates new work.

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

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.

Now, here is the point about the self: it is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuff full.

A process of accretion. Barnacles growing on a wreck or a rock. I'd rather have a wreck than a ship that sails. Things attach themselves to wrecks. Strange fish find your wreck or rock to be a good feeding ground; after a while you've got a situation with possibilities.

The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.

You came and fell upon me, I was sitting in the wicker chair. The wicker exclaimed as your weight fell upon me. You were light, I thought, and I thought how good it was of you to do this. We'd never touched before.

Of course we did everything right, insofar as we were able to imagine what right was.

All of us...still believe that the American flag betokens a kind of general righteousness. But I say...that signs are signs and some of them are lies.

But we little know until tried how much of the uncontrollable there is in us, urging across glaciers and torrents, and up dangerous heights, let the judgement forbid as it may.

You may not be interested in absurdity, she said firmly, but absurdity is interested in you.

There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the meaning of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.

the writer is [...] the work's way of getting itself written

art is a meditation upon external reality rather than a representation of external reality

The world in the evening seems fraught with the absence of promise, if you are a married man. There is nothing to do but go home and drink your nine drinks and forget about it.

Fathers are teachers of the true and not-true, and no father ever knowingly teaches what is not true. In a cloud of unknowing, then, the father proceeds with his instruction.

Little is known about her. We are assured, however, that the same damnable involvements that obsess us obsess her too. Copulation. Strangeness. Applause.

never figured out what sort of animal I was

Machines are braver than art.