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 LERNERExperiments 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.
More Ben Lerner Quotes
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Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.
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The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
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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.
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Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.
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Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.
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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.
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I didn’t want to write another book about fraudulence.
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