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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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Donald Barthelme
Age: 58 †
Born: 1931
Born: April 7
Died: 1989
Died: July 23
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Reporter
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Think
Movement
Thinking
Lines
Talk
Purpose
Locating
Point
Horizontal
Speak
Vertical
Art
Line
Things
Progress

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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 important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.
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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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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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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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Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.
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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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There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.
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Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.
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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.
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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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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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The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
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.
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Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
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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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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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The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.
Donald Barthelme