135 Quotes by Donald Barthelme

Fathers are teachers of the true and not-true, and no father ever knowingly teaches what is not true. In a cloud of unknowing, then, the father proceeds with his instruction.

The snow is coming,” she said. “Soon it will be snow time. Together then as in other snow times. Drinking busthead ’round the fire. Truth is a locked room that we knock the lock off from time to time, and then board up again. Tomorrow you will hurt me, and I will inform you that you have done so, and so on and so on. To hell with it. Come, viridian friend, come and sup with me.

Hubert complains that the electric wastebasket has been overheating. I haven’t noticed it but that’s what Hubert says and Hubert is rarely wrong about things that don’t matter. The electric wastebasket is a security item. Papers dropped into it are destroyed instantly. How the electric wastebasket accomplishes this is not known. An intimidation followed by a demoralization eventuating in a disintegration, one assumes. It is not emptied. There are not even ashes.

I have to admit we are mired in the most exquisite mysterious muck. This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor.

The important thing is the educational experience itself – how to survive it.

There is no moment that exceeds in beauty that moment when one looks at a woman and finds that she is looking at you in the same way that you are looking at her. The moment in which she bestows that look that says, “Proceed with your evil plan, sumbitch.

How can he be killed most easily? With the fewest stains?

Some people’, Miss R. said,’run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.

There’s not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.