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I’m attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Ben Marcus

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife’s a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.
BEN MARCUS

House Kids Summer Wife Writing
Slamming the book shut produces a wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.
BEN MARCUS

Book Copyright Permisson Weather Wind
I’m interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or ‘explains,’ the larger mysteries of religion.
BEN MARCUS

Disappointment Feels Mystery
My goal, with whatever I’m working on, is to lose track of time.
BEN MARCUS

Goal Loses Track
Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need.
BEN MARCUS

Prayer Rain Sky
I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.
BEN MARCUS

Follow Thinking Truth Way
Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.
BEN MARCUS

Disorder Information World
You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.
BEN MARCUS

Consequences Detect Terrible Test
Being with him was like being alone underwater – everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.
BEN MARCUS

Alone Being Like Love Underwater
To me one of the amazing technologies of writing is the way it can listen in on thoughts. I don’t feel that that’s natural to other art forms in the same way.
BEN MARCUS

Art Feel Listen Technology Writing
A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
BEN MARCUS

Body Self Sometimes
I’m an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard’s books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work – the pursuit of darkness, the negative – and I think in some sense I’ve internalised that as what one is supposed to do.
BEN MARCUS

Book Darkness Negative Thinking
Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I’ve written and throwing it away.
BEN MARCUS

Teaching Thinking Writing
The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can’t just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.
BEN MARCUS

Hands Thinking Worry
I work, and then I leave the office, and I’m with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don’t feel like I’m exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.
BEN MARCUS

Ideas Kids Parenthood Play
I’m attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.
BEN MARCUS

Children Parent Way

I’m attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

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I’m attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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