Donald Barthelme Quotes
His examiner...said severely: 'Baskerville, you blank round, discursiveness is not literature.' 'The aim of literature,' Baskerville replied grandly, 'is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.'
Quotes to Explore
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It's not just the actor in front of the camera. And it's important to have respect for all those people that work behind the camera.
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We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
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The old series of sittings with Mrs. Piper convinced me of survival for reasons which I should find it hard to formulate in any strict fashion, but that was their distinct effect.
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A Tea Party tidal wave is coming.
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I know exactly what it's like to stand on top of a tall building or in a high place and look down and go, 'Ohhhh my God.' I try to get into that place every time I write a scene like that. And definitely when I write the action scenes, I get overheated and my heart goes really fast. I get very involved.
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You try to do what you can to bring harmony wherever you go.
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In 1956, I received an invitation to a dedication of an observatory in the Soviet Union, in Soviet Armenia, as a guest of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
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The song 'Innocent' is a song that I wrote about something that really, really emotionally impacted me.
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Sometimes my family got me in the door. Somebody would say, 'Bruce Dern's daughter - sure I'd like to meet her.' It was a point of interest. But after five minutes of talking about my father, I still had to read for the part.
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I wouldn't call myself religious. I'm spiritual. Everybody's a bit more so as you get older. I'm a cultural Catholic; it's inescapable, but I think I have to believe.
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Of course, in the United States, which at the time was a very young country, there were also class distinctions. They weren't as pronounced, but they quickly evolved as well.
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Our comedies are not to be laughed at.
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As a writer, Chris Columbus was a big influence. 'The Goonies' was the first movie I ever saw that kids speak normally and not imagined how kids would talk. Always a big fan of Chris Columbus' dialogue and storytelling.
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I like change, and I like being in the middle of change.
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Kim Kardashian's marriage to Kris Humphries famously lasted 72 days, and was reported in the tabloids as being all about the big bucks paid by magazines for the bridal photos: it is a spectacle of a bride-to-be as entrepreneur, not as romantic heroine; the groom, in this scenario, is nothing but a prop.
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My accent is... sort of an Edinburgh sort of soft southwest Scottish accent. It could almost be English.
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I would break a lot of cymbals. You whack the cymbals hard enough, and they will crack in half. Drums are not actually as sturdy as they look. They're actually somewhat fragile instruments.
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The feeling of sleepiness when you are not in bed, and can't get there, is the meanest feeling in the world.
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The desert grows: woe to him in whom deserts hide ...
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There's a melody in everything. And once you find the melody, then you connect immediately with the heart. Because sometimes English or Spanish, Swahili or any language gets in the way. But nothing penetrates the heart faster than the melody.
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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
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If God were to appear in my room, obviously I would be in awe, but I don't think I would be humble. I might cry, but I think he would dig me like crazy.
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If you want to be more alive, love is the truest health.
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His examiner...said severely: 'Baskerville, you blank round, discursiveness is not literature.' 'The aim of literature,' Baskerville replied grandly, 'is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.'
