# Quote — Donald Barthelme, Not-Knowing

> 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.

- Author: [Donald Barthelme](https://www.leafyquotes.com/donald-barthelme.md)
- Book: [Not-Knowing](https://www.leafyquotes.com/donald-barthelme/not-knowing.md)
- Page: 298
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Not-Knowing:_The_Essays_and_Interviews_of_Donald_Barthelme#Interviews) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/donald-barthelme/not-knowing/donald-barthelme-i-was

## More from this book

> BOBBIE ROE: Is the new generation of writers more concerned than their predecessors with politics, economics, and social class?
>
> DONALD BARTHELME: I think that there are lowered expectations, not æsthetic expectations for the work, but lowered expectations in terms of life. My generation, perhaps foolishly, expected, even demanded, that life be wonderful and magical and then tried to make it so by writing in a rather complex way. It seems now quite an eccentric demand.

p. 319 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/donald-barthelme/not-knowing/bobbie-roe-is-the.md)

> Americans have political problems that they don’t recognize as political. The impoverishment of the country by the arms race is a good example. Money spent on arms is, among other things, useless money in terms of the economy because it’s stored. It’s in nerve gas, aircraft carriers, the Stealth bomber. I gave a reading at the University of Alabama a couple of years ago, and on the way to the campus we passed an airfield packed with military aircraft, trillions of dollars’ worth of planes stacked up there, National Guard stuff, not even first-line stuff. The cost, the weight of this, is not understood by most Americans. They don’t know where their money’s going. They know they’re pressed for money and that their school systems are being eighty-sixed by national accrediting organizations, but they don’t connect this to that National Guard elephant graveyard. Black people think that they’re poor because they’re black and the white folks control the money. This is true, but black folks are damaged more by lousy economic policy than by racism.

p. 317 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/donald-barthelme/not-knowing/americans-have-political.md)

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

p. 22 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/donald-barthelme/not-knowing/when-computers-learn.md)