Top 70 Donald Barthelme Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.”

— Donald Barthelme

2. “See the moon? It hates us.”

— Donald Barthelme

3. “The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.”

— Donald Barthelme

4. “Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.”

— Donald Barthelme

5. “I don’t believe that we are what we do although many thinkers argue otherwise. I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are – an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality. Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew.”

— Donald Barthelme

6. “Is death that which gives meaning to life?”

— Donald Barthelme

7. “Maybe writing can’t be taught, but editing can be taught – prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.”

— Donald Barthelme

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.”

— Donald Barthelme

11. “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.”

— Donald Barthelme

12. “Some people’, Miss R. said,’run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.”

— Donald Barthelme

13. “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.”

— Donald Barthelme

14. “The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance.”

— Donald Barthelme

15. “The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day...”

— Donald Barthelme

16. “Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas. Another day, another dollar. Each man is valued at what he will bring in the marketplace. Meaning has been drained from work and assigned instead to remuneration.”

— Donald Barthelme

17. “And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.”

— Donald Barthelme

18. “Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.”

— Donald Barthelme

19. “The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.”

— Donald Barthelme

20. “Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.”

— Donald Barthelme

21. “The important thing is the educational experience itself – how to survive it.”

— Donald Barthelme

22. “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

23. “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

24. “Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.”

— Donald Barthelme

25. “The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.”

— Donald Barthelme

26. “Any genuine work of art generates new work.”

— Donald Barthelme

27. “As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven’t heard of some of them.”

— Donald Barthelme

28. “I don’t think you can talk about progress in art – movement, but not progress.”

— Donald Barthelme

29. “There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the “meaning” of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.”

— Donald Barthelme

30. “No man’s plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God’s will.”

— Donald Barthelme

31. “A process of accretion. Barnacles growing on a wreck or a rock. I’d rather have a wreck than a ship that sails. Things attach themselves to wrecks. Strange fish find your wreck or rock to be a good feeding ground; after a while you’ve got a situation with possibilities.”

— Donald Barthelme

32. “The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism, but what I had done was assume an attitude -melancholy sadness- toward it.”

— Donald Barthelme

33. “The death of God left the angels in a strange position.”

— Donald Barthelme

34. “Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.”

— Donald Barthelme

35. “Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.”

— Donald Barthelme

36. “Write about what you’re afraid of.”

— Donald Barthelme

37. “Of course we did everything right, insofar as we were able to imagine what “right” was.”

— Donald Barthelme

38. “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

39. “The much heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor.”

— Donald Barthelme

40. “Self-criticism sessions were held, but these produced more criticism than could usefully be absorbed or accomodated.”

— Donald Barthelme

41. “How can you be alienated without first having been connected?”

— Donald Barthelme

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

42. “One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.”

— Donald Barthelme

43. “The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.”

— Donald Barthelme

44. “There’s not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.”

— Donald Barthelme

Featured in: Strong Quotes

45. “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

46. “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.”

— Donald Barthelme

47. “Hubert complains that the electric wastebasket has been overheating. I haven’t noticed it but that’s what Hubert says and Hubert is rarely wrong about things that don’t matter. The electric wastebasket is a security item. Papers dropped into it are destroyed instantly. How the electric wastebasket accomplishes this is not known. An intimidation followed by a demoralization eventuating in a disintegration, one assumes. It is not emptied. There are not even ashes.”

— Donald Barthelme

48. “I am never needlessly obscure I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.”

— Donald Barthelme

49. “I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.”

— Donald Barthelme

50. “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.”

— Donald Barthelme

Featured in: Firsts Quotes