Donald Barthelme

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.

Beckett’s work is an embarrassment to the Void.

It is well to be simple once in a while.

I certainly don’t write to exclude anyone.

The difficulty here is not producing mere run-of-the-mill outrageousnous, but the nature of the transformational process by which aspects of the world are made over into art. How to prevent the ugly (what we have agreed to call ugly) from becoming, in some sense, beautiful (what we now agree to call beautiful) over time, thus losing the electrical charge which made the artist choose it in the first place? You can’t. But there are strategies of delay. Céline, with the aid of some truly revolting politics, managed to remain a monster almost to the end.

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

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

DONALD BARTHELME [of “post-modernist” fiction]: I say it’s realism, bearing on mind Harold Rosenberg’s wicked remark that realism is one of fifty-seven varieties of decoration.

BOBBIE ROE: What about the term “experimental”, which is often applied to your work?

BARTHELME: It’s not quite a hostile remark, but it does contain within it the notion of the failed experiment. Something like “Bone Bubbles” was, yes, an experiment and although I wouldn’t suggest it was wholly successful, I thought it worth publishing. It’s something I do along with a number of other things.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.

To say that the publishing world is not interested in literature is to overstate it. They are extremely interested in it, they just don’t want to publish it, you see. Publishers are brave, as brave as the famous diving horses of Atlantic City, but they’re increasingly owned by conglomerates, businesses which have nothing to do with publishing, and these companies demand a certain profit out of their publishing divisions. They take very few risks and they publish an enormous number of things which look like books, sort of feel like books, but in reality are buckets of peanut butter with a layer of whipped cream on top.

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.

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.