A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
BEN MARCUSYou can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.
More Ben Marcus Quotes
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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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I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
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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 love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.
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Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I’ve written and throwing it away.
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Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.
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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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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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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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