Ben Lerner Quotes
I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.
Quotes to Explore
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Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
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What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
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Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.
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I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.
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A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
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I love science fiction.
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'The Wire' really drew on a lot of real-life situations and real-life organizations - it created fiction to make a social statement about reality.
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There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
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Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.
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If utopian fiction became the new trend, I wouldn't read it.
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Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.
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If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
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I don't think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all.
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'Harry Potter' made it cool to read children's fiction, and 'Twilight' did the same for a slightly older age group. What I'm seeing is mothers and daughters who love to read the same books.
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The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.
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In really, really good science fiction, the line between the science and the fiction is blurry.
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I think most fiction focuses on uncomfortable settings because that's interesting.
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The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
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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.
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One day in Auschwitz I became so dispirited that I couldn't carry on. They had given me a beating, which wasn't exactly a pleasant experience. It was on a Sunday, and I said: 'I can't get up'. Then my comrades said: 'That's impossible, you have to get up, otherwise you're lost'. They went to a Dutch doctor, who worked with the German doctor. He came to me in the barracks and said: 'Get up and come to the hospital barracks early tomorrow morning. I'll talk to the German doctor and make sure you are admitted'. Because of that I survived.
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I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.
