Ben Lerner Quotes

Quotes about:

• Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

  Ben Lerner

  Art, Despair, Offers

  Ben Lerner (2014). “10:04”, p.69, Granta Books

  10 Copy quote

• The problem is that if you're self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn't something lost - some kind of presence? You're distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.

  Ben Lerner

  Self, Trying, Kind

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.

  Ben Lerner

  Light, Tears, Fiction

  4 Copy quote

• Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.

  Ben Lerner

  Cutting, Shaving, Way

  Ben Lerner (2014). “10:04”, p.127, Granta Books

  8 Copy quote

• I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

  Ben Lerner

  Literary Genre, Dying, Fiction

  Source: www.believermag.com

  10 Copy quote

• I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

  Ben Lerner

  Artist, Stupidity, Culture

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

  6 Copy quote

• I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.

  Ben Lerner

  Writing, Thinking, Self

  Interview with Tao Lin, www.believermag.com. 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

  Ben Lerner

  Reading, White, Important

  Ben Lerner (2012). “Leaving the Atocha Station”, p.11, Granta Books

  6 Copy quote

• I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.

  Ben Lerner

  Pain, Order, Bored

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

  Ben Lerner

  Writing, Fiction, Stories

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.

  Ben Lerner

  Art, Thinking, Matter

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

  5 Copy quote

• I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds of moments in our daily lives that break - or at least could break - from the logic of profit and the modes of domination it entails. Zones of freedom, even if it's never pure.

  Ben Lerner

  Talking, Sides, Logic

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.

  Ben Lerner

  Character, Psychology, Depth

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

  Ben Lerner

  Novelists, Want, Lost

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

  Ben Lerner

  Cities, Would Be, Way

  Ben Lerner (2014). “10:04: A Novel”, p.4, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  10 Copy quote

• The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

  Ben Lerner

  Exciting, Awe Inspiring, Awe

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

  8 Copy quote

• If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

  Ben Lerner

  Practice, Admitting, Kind

  Ben Lerner (2012). “Leaving the Atocha Station”, p.58, Granta Books

  8 Copy quote

• I don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened.

  Ben Lerner

  Thinking, Mind, Fiction

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it's an antidote to despair.

  Ben Lerner

  Powerful, Thinking, Ideas

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.

  Ben Lerner

  Real, Liars, Bipolar

  Ben Lerner (2011). “Leaving the Atocha Station”, p.158, Coffee House Press

  4 Copy quote

• Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

  Ben Lerner

  Dream, Moving, Cutting

  Ben Lerner (2016). “No Art: Poems”, p.114, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.

  Ben Lerner

  Cutting, Fog, Feelings

  8 Copy quote

• I don't think it's always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn't imply people aren't multi-dimensional.

  Ben Lerner

  Thinking, People, Fiction

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.

  Ben Lerner

  Character, Way, Privacy

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I guess I want to capture that process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals.

  Ben Lerner

  Art, Reading, Offering

  Source: www.believermag.com

  20 Copy quote

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