Donald Barthelme

Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. They've been a laboratory for everybody.

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

I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.

We have to base architecture on the environment.

I was thinking of going to London drama schools or to New York, because France didn't accommodate the things I wanted to do in film.

They said I couldn't play anything but an English boy. I knew I could. So I went to New York.