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

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
Hard
Work
Escaped
Ingenuity
Distracted
Cannot
Self

More quotes by Donald Barthelme

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My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.
Donald Barthelme
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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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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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I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.
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And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
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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 think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
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Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.
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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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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.
Donald Barthelme
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Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.
Donald Barthelme
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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.
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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 am never needlessly obscure - I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
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.
Donald Barthelme
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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.
Donald Barthelme
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Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don't count?
Donald Barthelme
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I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.
Donald Barthelme
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The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
Donald Barthelme