I’m ashamed and embarrassed to say that I’ve read very little of David Foster Wallace’s work. It’s a huge gap in my education, one of many.
BEN FOUNTAINI 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.
More Ben Fountain Quotes
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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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Maybe the light’s at the other end of the tunnel.
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I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.
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By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.
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Late bloomer’ is another way of saying ‘slow learner.
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The Kessler Theater is one such gem, an Art Deco beauty … for a slice of real life, there’s always the Kessler.
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Haiti is unique – the first successful slave revolt in history, the first black republic etc., and then when you get into the culture, the voodoo, and that wonderful synchretization of Christian and African belief and symbology, it’s like nothing the world has ever seen.
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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.
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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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It is sort of weird being honored for the worst day of your life.
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The smartest thing I did in law school: asking my future wife to go out dancing with me. The smartest thing I did when practicing law: quitting. The smartest thing I’ve done in writing: following my own head and writing what I wanted to write, and nothing but.
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I never listen to music when I’m writing.
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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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You’d think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people.
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From about the age of 15 or 16 I’d had the notion that I wanted to write fiction, and I’d done enough in college to satisfy myself that I had a knack for it – I wouldn’t call it “talent” – though I wondered if I’d ever have the guts to actually commit to it.
BEN FOUNTAIN







