Ben Lerner quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Ben Lerner on Wise Famous Quotes.

The chicken is a little dry and/or you've ruined my life.

The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media, I said, meaninglessly.

I didn't want to write another book about fraudulence.

I promised to pass through a series of worlds with you, I remembered from her vows.

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

You are the first and last indigenous Nintendo.

The fatal problem with poetry: poems.

Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.

I don't want what we're doing to just end up as notes for a novel.

I imagined the passengers could see me, imagined I was a passenger that could see me looking up at myself looking down.

The lie described my life better than the truth,' I added. 'Until it became a kind of truth.

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Since the world is ending," Peter quoted from behind us, "why not let the children touch the paintings?

What normally felt like the only possible world became one among many

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

Nothing in the world, I thought to myself, is as old as what was futuristic in the past.

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

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

The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.

I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former

[A] "poem" is understood as [something] referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures

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

The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.

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

Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.

The voices and laughter and birds and wind and traffic combined and separated gently.

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?

I could imagine it in a way that felt like remembering

I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.