A book is not a tweet. A book is not a half-hour television show. A book requires for both reader and writer sustained discipline attention. It asks you to immerse yourself in something and really deeply feel it.
BEN H. WINTERSA book is not a tweet. A book is not a half-hour television show. A book requires for both reader and writer sustained discipline attention. It asks you to immerse yourself in something and really deeply feel it.
BEN H. WINTERSThe election of Donald Trump is, to me, this very clownish personality with no political experience, who had literally been using fascist slogans in his campaign. It had seemed so impossible.
BEN H. WINTERSIt is really something, the extent to which we allow ourselves to live without thinking of things that we know, in the abstract, are bad, and are going on right now, somewhere far away.
BEN H. WINTERSWe forget the conditions – not only in slavery – but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today’s incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things.
BEN H. WINTERSThe membrane between where we are right now and a very different reality, is so much thinner than we like to think. Things can go back, and things can go to the side, and things can go to places where we might not even have been on guard that they might go.
BEN H. WINTERSWe pretend that everything that has happened happened long ago, and then we act as if we all now just treat each other equally, everything will be fine.
BEN H. WINTERSIt is part of what makes America great. That tradition of the free press, and also the tradition of this highly competitive market for investigative journalism. We’re seeing, there’s no question, that we’re seeing a renaissance of that.
BEN H. WINTERSWe spend so much time, these days, on forms of literature that don’t rise to be literature, and I’m speaking about Twitter posts and quick and hot takes on different websites. We sort of zoom from thing to thing like a hummingbird.
BEN H. WINTERSIn terms of optimism, I am optimistic. I do think that, in the long term, that America will right itself. I have to think so.
BEN H. WINTERSWe think, “Well, what are you gonna do?” In a way, that little instinct, that “What are you gonna do?” is the most dangerous thing in the world.
BEN H. WINTERSI think that, we as a culture, feel like politics is one sector of our lives that can feel apart from our personal lives and the cultural things we’re interested in and the sports we watch. It feels like this separate, different thing.
BEN H. WINTERSI think it’s hard sometimes for people to grapple with the real-life consequences of political change.
BEN H. WINTERSIt must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.
BEN H. WINTERSI think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone’s mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.
BEN H. WINTERSFiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.
BEN H. WINTERSOne thing we’ve learned about Donald Trump – this candidate first, president-elect, and now president – is that he has this sort of reptilian instinct for rooting out supposed enemies and finding people he can whip up distrust into rage.
BEN H. WINTERS