Ben Lerner Quotes
The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.
Quotes to Explore
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I don't know how much the economy has changed since Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal.'
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I joined the Actors Studio and began to work with Lee Strasberg, and that changed my work.
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Not everybody goes to movies to get their life changed.
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The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.
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I've learnt that, even though I've travelled about, I haven't changed that much.
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Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.
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Love Me Do, the first song we recorded, John was supposed to sing the lead, but they changed their minds and asked me to sing lead because they wanted John to play harmonica.
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The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.
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The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.
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When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.
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When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
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What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
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A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.
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We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
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I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.
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Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.
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I beg your pardon I didn't recognise you - I've changed a lot.
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The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.
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A poem begins with a lump in the throat.
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Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air. The loss of confidence that affected banks and financial instruments was not affecting cherubs, cupids and flattened popes. The objects hadn't changed: what was there before was there after. But a vacancy was created with the clamoring crowds deserted and retrenched.
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I'm a really firm believer that anyone can get pretty good at anything if you just do it all the time and you just keep working at it.
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These great turning-days of life cast no shadow before, slip by unconsciously. Only a trifle, a little turn of the rudder, and the ship goes to heaven or hell.
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For as Socrates says that a wise man is a citizen of the world, so I thought that a wise woman was equally at liberty to range through every station or degree of men, to fix her choice wherever she pleased.
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The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.
