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My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

Ben Lerner

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
BEN LERNER

Art Despair Offers
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

Admitting Kind Practice
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.
BEN LERNER

Lost Medical Trying
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.
BEN LERNER

Fiction Mind Thinking
Maybe now if you’re not an exhibitionist you’re private. Or maybe it’s just that for a lot of people – sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways – there’s no division between the art object and what surrounds it.
BEN LERNER

Art People Stupid
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

Character Privacy Way
I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.
BEN LERNER

City Grid Sincerity
Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.
BEN LERNER

Cutting Shaving Way
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

Dream Eye Firefly
Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
BEN LERNER

Country Firefly West Coast
I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
BEN LERNER

Bipolar Liars Real
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.
BEN LERNER

Mean Octopus Order
My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.
BEN LERNER

Fiction Real World
The scare quotes burn off like fog.
BEN LERNER

Burn Fog Quote Scare
I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.
BEN LERNER

Artist Culture Stupidity
Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.
BEN LERNER

Astronaut Carry Cases Sidearms

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

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Popular Authors

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben Lerner Quotes