Quote

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

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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
Going
Full
Rapacious
Always
Call
Hankering
Never
Point
Flaming
World
Stuff
Insatiable
Might
Fault
Self
Mouth
Great
Faults
Thing
Mouths

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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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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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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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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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Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.
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Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
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The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
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Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
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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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There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.
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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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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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And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
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Write about what you're afraid of.
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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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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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Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
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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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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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.
Donald Barthelme