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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

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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
Quite
Situation
Middling
Common
Blurred
Success
Fortunately
Everything
Absolutely
Thing
Failure
Always
Achieve
Never
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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.
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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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The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
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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?
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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.
Donald Barthelme
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Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.
Donald Barthelme
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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.
Donald Barthelme
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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.
Donald Barthelme
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I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
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Write about what you're afraid of.
Donald Barthelme
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Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
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Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
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Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.
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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.
Donald Barthelme
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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.
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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I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.
Donald Barthelme
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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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The death of God left the angels in a strange position.
Donald Barthelme
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And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
Donald Barthelme