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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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Donald Barthelme
Age: 58 †
Born: 1931
Born: April 7
Died: 1989
Died: July 23
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Reporter
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Community
Victim
Bigs
Capitalism
Fall
Competition
Sense
Available
Every
Places
Piles
Men
Wealth
Accumulate
People
Struggle
Falls
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Fellows
More quotes by Donald Barthelme
Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.
Donald Barthelme
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
Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
Donald Barthelme
Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don't count?
Donald Barthelme
Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.
Donald Barthelme
And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
Donald Barthelme
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
Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
Donald Barthelme
I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
Donald Barthelme
Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
Donald Barthelme
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
The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.
Donald Barthelme
Will you be wanting to contest the divorce? I asked Mrs. Davis. I should think not, she said calmly, although I suppose on of us should, for the fun of the thing. An uncontested divorce always seems to me contrary to the spirit of divorce.
Donald Barthelme
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
There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.
Donald Barthelme
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
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.
Donald Barthelme
The death of God left the angels in a strange position.
Donald Barthelme
There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.
Donald Barthelme
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
