Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme
This article is about the author, Donald Barthelme Jr. For his father, the architect, see Donald Barthelme...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 April 1931
CountryUnited States of America
tickets spots lottery-ticket
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.
fun divorce thinking
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.
stress feel-better people
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.
two rivers smell
I smell fennel," Launcelot said. "That reminds me, I should tell you I have discovered a specific for maims. You take salt, good-quality river mud, and bee urine, and slather it on the maim and hold it there for two days. Works like a charm. Gathering the bee urine is a bit of a bore.
reading book white
We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having "completed" them.
divorce thinking sticks
Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don't count?
witty cutting winning
HENRY: 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.
book writing people
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.
order parent making-love
Faint equivalents can sometimes be found ... . Or it can be rendered obliquely-an adolescent's mental image of his or her parents making love, which must be something on the order of crocodiles mating.
home white snow
Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out.
world advertising caught
Can the life of the time be caught in an advertisement? Is that how it is, really, in the meadows of the world?
art reading mean
What an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature... (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something "out there" which cannot be brought "here". This is standard. I don't mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a "successful artist" (except, of course, in worldly terms).
eye men roaring
The question so often asked of modern painting, "What is it?", contains more than the dull skepticism of the man who is not going to have the wool pulled over his eyes. It speaks of a fundamental placement in relation to the work, that of a voyager in the world coming upon a strange object. The reader reconstitutes the work by his active participation, by approaching the object, tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within. It is characteristic of the object that it does not declare itself all at once, in a rush of pleasant naïveté.
men impervious gods-will
No man's plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God's will.