Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
BEN LERNERWhat interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.
More Ben Lerner Quotes
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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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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.
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Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. “Ari” appears on the edge of this book a couple of times – but on the edge, she’s never in it, even if she’s a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.
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What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.
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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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I like to think – knowing that it’s an enabling fiction – of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn’t the only measure of value.
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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.
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The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
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I don’t think it’s always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn’t imply people aren’t multi-dimensional.
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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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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.
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I don’t think “I’m going to publish this as fiction” but I think “I’m going to tell this story to a friend” and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it’s already happened.
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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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I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
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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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