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 LERNERAre there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
More Ben Lerner Quotes
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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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Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.
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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.
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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 was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
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I didn’t want to write another book about fraudulence.
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The scare quotes burn off like fog.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
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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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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.
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Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
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