Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly… — Donald Barthelme
Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful. I agree that this is a highly specialized enterprise, akin to the manufacture of merkins, say—but it’s what I do. Probably I have missed the point of the literature business entirely.
p. 57Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
When computers learn how to make jokes, artists will be in serious trouble.
p. 22
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
