Donald Barthelme Quotes

Failures in art usually lead to something else interesting.

That's just a part of being an artist: you can't write great stuff all the time, because if you did, then you'd be inhuman. The human side of people is that sometimes they fail.

It is so much worse to be a mediocre artist than to be a mediocre post-office clerk.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

You know how you're always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it's real difficult in life

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

There is always a struggle, a striving for something bigger than yourself in all forms of art. And even if you don't achieve greatness, even if you fail, which we all must, everything you do in your work is somehow connected with your attitude toward life, your deepest secret feelings.

Making art is an act of courage. Do you know who said that?

A great artist has to be ready to fail.

An artist, a man, a failure, must proceed.

A face in the picture would bother me, so I'd rub it out with the turpentine and do it over.

I guess I'll just slip into the studio after the next time with the Muses, and then just keel over and die.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

The artist in me cries out for design.

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding.

I learned long ago to accept the fact that not everything I create will see the light of day.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

Is an artist much more than a beggar?

People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

I strongly believe cinema is popular culture. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That's life.