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

Donald Barthelme

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Donald Barthelme
Age: 58 †
Born: 1931
Born: April 7
Died: 1989
Died: July 23
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Reporter
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Movement
Talk
Art
Think
Thinking
Progress

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Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
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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.
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There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.
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Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
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I am never needlessly obscure - I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
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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.
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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.
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Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.
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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.
Donald Barthelme
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Now it is necessary to court her, and win her, and put on this clean dressing gown, and cut my various nails, and drink something that will kill the millions of germs in my mouth, and say something flattering, and be witty and bonny, and hale and kinky, all just to ease this wrinkle in the groin. It seems a high price.
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Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.
Donald Barthelme
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Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
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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.
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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.
Donald Barthelme