Ben Lerner Quotes
Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.
Quotes to Explore
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The problem with writing a monthly book is that you're going through your work like a man running for a bus, red-faced and out of breath. There isn't time for reflection or critical self-examination.
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I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.
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A book is a gift you can open again and again.
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In the biographical novel, there's only one person involved. I, the author, spend two to five years becoming the main character. I do that so by the time you get to the bottom of Page 2 or 3, you forget your name, where you live, your profession and the year it is. You become the main character of the book. You live the book.
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A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.
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A comprehensive marketing plan involves both online and offline efforts to use and broaden your existing platform to promote your book.
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I don't know David Cameron very well. I like him. I think you can judge a book by its cover - whoever said you can't is wrong - that's the whole point of nature giving us intuition, instinct and so on. I think the cover is pretty good.
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I try to do that in this book without preaching - to try to do as you just said that you really have to defend the First Amendment rights of everybody.
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He who loveth a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counsellor, a cheerful companion, or an effectual comforter.
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I've soaked up so much through dancing, but I also have to be still. I want to be silent and read, to shut up and take time to respect the vision someone put into a book.
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That wasn't a bad price for a first book. My agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment.
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I did a book event with a former colleague, Bob Bauer, and was so relieved that he said I got all the CIA stuff right.
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Music to me was never something that I could listen to while reading a book. Especially when I was studying music, if I was going to listen to music, I was going to put on the headphones or crank the stereo, and by God, I was going to sit there and just listen to music. I wasn't going to talk on the phone and multitask, which I can't do anyway.
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I love mystery novels... I love seeing the dramas played out in academic departments, particularly English departments. I started reading these when I was going up for tenure.
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'Reinventing the Bazaar,' by John McMillan, is a great and fun introduction to the wild variety and importance of markets throughout history and around the world. I finally understood how a Middle Eastern souk actually works economically and how to compare that to modern-day telecom-spectrum auctions. I love that book.
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Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
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I guess a lot of comic-book adaptations strive for realism. Christopher Nolan is making Batman seem very real and very serious.
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There is nothing quite like having your book read and truly understood. It's all the better when it's someone who knows how to go out there and sell it.
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Ah yes, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.
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After me, the Revolution - or, rather the ideas which formed it - will resume their course. It will be like a book from which the marker is removed, and one starts to read again at the page where one left off.
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More of the same will just produce more of the same: less competitiveness, less growth, fewer jobs.
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I didn't even know how much of a feminist I was, and I realized, 'Oh my God, I was raised by a single mom who had to raise six kids. I have three sisters. Larry, you've been a feminist your whole life, and you really didn't know it until you've been presented with these issues.'
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Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.
