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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
Tiny
Except
Among
Mud
Thinking
Minded
Divorce
Count
Stick
Sticks

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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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Write about what you're afraid of.
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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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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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There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.
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The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
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Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.
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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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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.
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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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The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.
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I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
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He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it... he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice.
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Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
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I am never needlessly obscure - I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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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.
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I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.
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The center will not hold if it has been spot-welded by an operator whose deepest concern is not with the weld but with his lottery ticket.
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