DONALD BARTHELME: ...I was trying to make fiction that was like certain kinds of modern painting. You know… — Donald Barthelme
DONALD BARTHELME: ...I was trying to make fiction that was like certain kinds of modern painting. You know, tending toward the abstract. But it’s really very dicey in fiction, because if you get too abstract it just looks like fog, for example.
JO BRANS: Words, after all, have referents. They mean something—colors don’t.
BARTHELME: Not in the same way. So, the project is next to impossible, which is what makes it interesting. There’s nothing so beautiful as having a very difficult problem. It gives purpose to life. And to work. I’m still worrying with it.
p. 298Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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There’s always the tension between losing an audience and doing the odd things you might want to try. The effort is always to make what you write nourishing or useful to readers. You do cut out some readers by idiosyncrasies of form. I regret this.
p. 271
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.
p. 214

