I quit law in 1988 to start writing, and it took me 17 years from that point to get a book contract. I guess you can say I was on the slow train.
BEN FOUNTAINIt is sort of weird being honored for the worst day of your life.
More Ben Fountain Quotes
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I got brilliant stories from people who’d never set foot in an MFA program and had published very little, and terrible stories from people who’d published a lot and had all the credentials. It was all over the map and that was part of the fun.
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It’s amazing what happens when you stick yourself in a place and let things take their more or less natural course.
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I realized I was never going to have any peace with myself unless I made an honest stab at trying to write.
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It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me – that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.
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Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.
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If you could figure out how to live with family then you’d gone a long way toward finding your peace.
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Late bloomer’ is another way of saying ‘slow learner.
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If a person wants to be of any use to himself, he better insist on getting his fair share of beauty and pleasure, and if there’s something about the system that’s keeping him from getting his share, then I think he’s well within his rights to fight to change that.
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I kept going back while I was writing the novel – which never sold, may it rest in peace – and by the time it was finished I had too many connections to Haiti to walk away.
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I thought when I started writing that I’d have a book out in four or five years, and as it became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen, I became increasingly frustrated and unsure of myself.
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So many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing.
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I have a horror of being self-indulgent and wasting time, and there is that risk in doing this kind of work. Are you totally deluded in sitting down at a desk every day and trying to write something? Is it self-indulgent, or might it possibly lead to something worthwhile?
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I really had to decide why I was writing. I had no interest in going back to law; I very briefly – for about six hours – considered going to get my MBA, but in the end, I realized that the only work I really wanted to do was write.
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Eruptions of talent continue to happen in Haiti, in spite of everything.
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There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.
BEN FOUNTAIN







