• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

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.

Ben Lerner

Related Topics

ArtMatterThinking

Popular Authors

Marilyn Monroe Paulo Coelho Abraham Lincoln C. S. Lewis Khalil Gibran Charlie Chaplin Gautama Buddha Isaac Newton

| Next

More Ben Lerner Quotes

• 

  The problem is that if you’re self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn’t something lost – some kind of presence? You’re distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.

  BEN LERNER
  KindSelfTrying
• 

  The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

  BEN LERNER
  AweExcitingInspiring
• 

  I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.

  BEN LERNER
  ArtistCultureStupidity
• 

  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.

  BEN LERNER
  CuttingFeelingsFog
• 

  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.

  BEN LERNER
  ChangedNovelStories
• 

  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.

  BEN LERNER
  DreamEyeFirefly
• 

  I didn’t want to write another book about fraudulence.

  BEN LERNER
  BookWantWriting
• 

  I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

  BEN LERNER
  DyingFictionGenreLiterary
• 

  Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.

  BEN LERNER
  CountryFireflyWest Coast
• 

  Maybe that’s the way I’m private – I respect the privacy of “my” characters? Anyway, we’re getting close to the whole “relatability” and “likability” thing.

  BEN LERNER
  CharacterPrivacyWay
• 

  I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.

  BEN LERNER
  BipolarLiarsReal
• 

  Experiments 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.

  BEN LERNER
  CriticismFictionWriting
• 

  The scare quotes burn off like fog.

  BEN LERNER
  BurnFogQuoteScare
• 

  I wasn’t aware I’d write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

  BEN LERNER
  FictionStoryWriting
• 

  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.

  BEN LERNER
  BoredOrderPain
• 

  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.

  BEN LERNER
  AdmittingKindPractice