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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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Donald Barthelme
Age: 58 †
Born: 1931
Born: April 7
Died: 1989
Died: July 23
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Reporter
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Count
Stick
Sticks
Tiny
Except
Among
Mud
Thinking
Minded
Divorce

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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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And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
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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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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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Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
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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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Write about what you're afraid of.
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The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
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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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Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
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I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
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The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
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Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
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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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