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.
BEN MARCUSSorry, 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.
More Ben Marcus Quotes
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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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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.
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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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My goal, with whatever I’m working on, is to lose track of time.
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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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A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
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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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You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.
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Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.
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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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I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
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My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.
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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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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