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 LERNERThe scare quotes burn off like fog.
More Ben Lerner Quotes
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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 was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
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Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
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I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it’s imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it’s an antidote to despair.
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I usually see the word “metafiction” applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.
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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.
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I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.
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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 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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The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
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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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I’m trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.
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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.
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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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Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
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