SOURCE: "An interview with Donald Barthelme," in Partisan Review, Vol. 49, No. 2, 1982, pp. 184-93.

In the following interview, Barthelme discusses his life, his literary influences, his views on language and literature, and his works.

[McCaffery:] You've published two novels, but most of your work has been in short fiction.

[Barthelme:] Novels take me a long time; short fiction provides a kind of immediate gratification—the relationship of sketches to battle paintings. Over a period of years I can have a dozen bad ideas for novels, some of which I actually invest a certain amount of time in. Some of these false starts yield short pieces: most don't. The first story in Sadness—"La Critique de la Vie Quotidienne"—is salvage.

Do stories typically begin for you by landing on you, like the dog in "Falling Dog"?

Well, for about four days I've been writing what amounts to nonsense. And...