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I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.

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
Like
Nervous
Writers
Cities
Made
Think
Thinking

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There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.
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The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
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Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
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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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Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.
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Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
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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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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.
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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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I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.
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Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
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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.
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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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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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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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Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
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And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love...And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.
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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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The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.
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And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
Donald Barthelme