My first book, ‘The Age of Wire and String,’ came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.
BEN MARCUSBeing with him was like being alone underwater – everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.
More Ben Marcus Quotes
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Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I’ve written and throwing it away.
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Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
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In certain strains of Judaism, there’s a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, our tiny minds can’t possibly comprehend Him. If we find ourselves comprehending Him, then we can be sure we’re off track.
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The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms – the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.
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In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it’s vivid, I find that I care about it, and it’s part of me.
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I’m interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or ‘explains,’ the larger mysteries of religion.
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Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I’d said that, how many times I’d meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry.
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Mostly we’re motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there’s a bit of a lab for bad behavior.
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When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I’ve come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.
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RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of.
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Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I’ve always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.
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I work, and then I leave the office, and I’m with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don’t feel like I’m exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.
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You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.
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A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.
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A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
BEN MARCUS