(1931–1989)
U.S. author, journalist, editor, and professor
Donald Barthelme
Novels take me a long time; short fiction provides a kind of immediate gratification—the relationship of sketches to battle paintings.
Interview with Larry McCaffery (1980), in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (New York: Random House, 1997), 261.
De Kooning can do “messy” by making a charcoal stroke over paint and then smudging same with his talented thumb—in prose the same gesture tends to look like simple ineptitude. De Kooning has a whole vocabulary of bad behavior which enables him to set up the most fruitful kinds of contradictions. It frees him. I have trouble rendering breaking glass.
Interview with J. O. O’Hara, in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (New York: Random House, 1997), 284.
There’s nothing more rewarding than a fresh set of problems.
Interview with Billie Fitzpatrick (1987), in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (New York: Random House, 1997), 314.
The order of pieces in a given book is mostly a matter of trying to make sure they don’t get in each other’s way. Much like hanging pictures for a show. Some pictures fight other pictures, not because either is a bad picture, but because the scale fights or the color fights.
Interview with J. D. O’Hara (1981), in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (New York: Random House, 1997), 282–83.
There’s no question but that much of what is published in this country is cotton candy and that this cluttering-up of the bookstores damages writers. To say nothing of what such a diet does to the brain’s stomach, if you’re a reader. But you can’t complain about this too much; it’s a pluralism that allows R. Crumb and Walter Benjamin and William Gaddis and Julia Child all to live in paperback heaven together.
Interview with J. O. O’Hara, in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (New York: Random House, 1997), 291.