Donald Barthelme

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

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

“Humor is the great alternative to psychosis,” Gregory Bateson has remarked. It is clear that there was no comedy before the Fall, no one cracking jokes in Eden; there was no need. Holy books, Baudelaire points out, never laugh. The perfection they envision, should the Way be followed exquisitely and completely, robs humor of its necessity, its ground. In the earthly paradise, Baudelaire writes, “as no trouble afflicted him, man’s countenance was simple and smooth, and the laughter that now shakes the nations never distorted the features of his face.” Less perfect times are likely to produce a great many jokes, variously inflected; thus, the Twentieth Century staggers toward its close in a blizzard of one-liners.

I look for a particular kind of sentence, perhaps more often the awkward than the beautiful. A broke-back sentence is interesting. Any sentence that begins with the phrase, “It is not clear that...” is clearly clumsy but preparing itself for greatness of a kind. A way of backing into a story—of getting past the reader’s hardwon armor.

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

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

I think that the effort is to reach a realm of meaning that is not quite sayable. You stay away from what can be said and you try to reach what can’t quite be said. Yet it is nevertheless meaningful. And there is such a realm and it is very difficult to talk about. It’s not quite nonverbal, but that comes fairly close.

I have said this too many times to make it interesting even to myself, but the principle of collage is one of the central principles of art in this century and it seems also to me to be one of the central principles of literature.

Rauschenberg’s problem ...is how to be bad for thirty years or more. To sustain a high level of misbehavior over a third of a century is not the easiest of tasks. The German writer Heimeto von Doderer put it this way: “One begins by breaking windows. Then one comes a window oneself.”

In the contemplation of nudes, we congratulate ourselves upon the beauty of which human beings are capable. They reassure us about ourselves, about Being. We are a little lower than the angels, true, but notice that we can get along without that suspect radiance, equal parts paint and literature, on which the angels lean so heavily. The human body is, or can be, a sufficiency.

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.

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