When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I’ve come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.
BEN MARCUSIt’s lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I’ve made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There’s joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it’s not yours.
More Ben Marcus Quotes
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The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms – the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.
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Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.
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I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.
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RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of.
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In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it’s vivid, I find that I care about it, and it’s part of me.
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I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
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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.
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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.
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To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.
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A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.
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My first book, ‘The Age of Wire and String,’ came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.
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Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.
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Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.
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My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.
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It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There’s so much power and often very little accountability.
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