Quotes by Ben Lerner - Page 1

The scare quotes burn off like fog.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Fog
Scare
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I didn't want to write another book about fraudulence.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Book
Want
Writing
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Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Art
Smile
Despair
Offers
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Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Astronaut
Cases
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I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Bipolar
Liars
Real
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Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
Ben Lerner / Poet
California
Firefly
West Coast
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The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Awe
Awe Inspiring
Exciting
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I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Dying
Fiction
Literary Genre
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Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Cutting
Shaving
Way
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Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Lost
Novelists
Want
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I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Cities
Way
Would Be
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Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Feels
Logic
Saturated
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I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Artist
Culture
Stupidity
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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.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Building
Fiction
Past
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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.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Changed
Novel
Stories
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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.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Criticism
Fiction
Writing
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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 / Poet
Fiction
Light
Tears
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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 / Poet
Character
Privacy
Way
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I'm trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Medical
Lost
Trying
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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 / Poet
Bored
Order
Pain
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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 / Poet
Fiction
Stories
Writing
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I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Fiction
Knowing
Thinking
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When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Mean
Octopus
Order
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Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Irony
Moving
Writing
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I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Contemporary Fiction
Literature
Thinking
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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 / Poet
Important
Reading
White
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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 / Poet
Art
Matter
Thinking
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My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Fiction
Real
World
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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 / Poet
Kind
Self
Trying
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Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Contemporary Fiction
Historical
Past
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I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing - a kind of night vision.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Dream
Eye
Firefly
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Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways - there's no division between the art object and what surrounds it.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Art
People
Stupid
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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 / Poet
Fiction
Mind
Thinking
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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 / Poet
Fiction
People
Thinking
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I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Attention
Order
Reality
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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 / Poet
Cutting
Feelings
Fog
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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 / Poet
Admitting
Kind
Practice
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Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Book
Couple
Real
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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 / Poet
Ideas
Powerful
Thinking
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When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of grease you put under your eyes to reduce glare or something. We only used it, of course, to look cool; it's not like we were any better prepubescent athletes for reducing glare.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Kids
Athlete
Baseball
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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 / Poet
Character
Depth
Psychology
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I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Color
Light
Thinking
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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 / Poet
Art
Offering
Reading
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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 / Poet
Self
Thinking
Writing
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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 / Poet
Logic
Sides
Talking
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I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experiences themselves - might become material for art. This kind of transformation shows up a lot in 10:04 because the book tracks the transposition of fact into fiction in the New Yorker stor
Ben Lerner / Poet
Art
Book
Track
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Your interviews or blog posts or whatever are less supplements to your novel than part of it. I'm not private, but I believe in literary form - I'll use my life as material for art (I don't know how not to do this) and I'll use art as a way of exploring that passage of life into art and vice versa, but that's not the same thing as thinking that any of the details of my life are interesting or relevant on their own.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Art
Believe
Thinking
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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 / Poet
Dream
Cutting
Moving
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The strange thing about the apocalypse is that it's uneven. For some people, it goes one way and for others another way, so that there's always this shifting relation to the narrative of the disaster. Sometimes apocalypses are just structural fictions, and sometimes they're real. Sometimes a narrative requires an end - the fact that the beginning was always leading somewhere becomes clear at the end. There's an idea that we're always in the middle, but we posit this apocalyptic end in order to also be able to project into the past or the beginning. I think that's true and false.
Ben Lerner / Poet
Past
Real
Thinking
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Ben Lerner Quotes - Page 1

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