It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There’s so much power and often very little accountability.
BEN MARCUSFiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.
More Ben Marcus Quotes
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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.
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Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
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In certain strains of Judaism, there’s a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, our tiny minds can’t possibly comprehend Him. If we find ourselves comprehending Him, then we can be sure we’re off track.
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Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there’s nothing to be done about them.
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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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Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.
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Mostly we’re motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there’s a bit of a lab for bad behavior.
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Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I’d said that, how many times I’d meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry.
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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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Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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