Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme Quotes

“It is well to be simple once in a while.”

“Originality is the last refuge of a hero...”

“I certainly don’t write to exclude anyone.”

“Beckett’s work is an embarrassment to the Void.”

“...I haven’t seen a government I’ve liked yet.”

“Beckett’s pessimism makes Greene’s pessimism look amateurish.”

“MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever...”

“When computers learn how to make jokes, artists will be in serious trouble.”

“Charm, as Goethe said, is the dead green bug on the golden leaf of occasion.”

“I enjoy doing layout—problems of design. I could very cheerfully be a typographer.”

“Any fool can cry wolf; to cry sheep is inspired, the work of a subtle, contradancing mind.”

“We are all engaged in looting the past. (Only the greatest geniuses manage to steal from the future.)”

“...he wouldn’t know what to do with a moral if handed one by the archangel Michael on a flaming sword.”

“[Sherrie] Levine is an artist for a dreadfully confused time. (We are always congratulating ourselves on our madness.)”

“JEROME KLINKOWITZ: Do you have any favorite comedians, and reasons for liking them?
DONALD BARTHELME: The government.”

“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.”

“In this century there’s been much stress placed not upon what we know but on knowing that our methods are themselves questionable—our Song of Songs is the Uncertainty Principle.”

“Like all artists, Love has a multiplicity of fathers, including those fathers who nip in for a night and are never heard from again, leaving a half-remembered image with no name to put to it.”

“...as one reads more and more and more you get more fathers in your hierarchy of fathers. And then, after summoning twenty or thirty fathers, perhaps you are born, or perhaps you are not born.”

“One of the beautiful things about words is that you can put words together which in isolation mean nothing, or mean only what the dictionary says they mean, and you put them together and you get extraordinary effects.”