Ben Lerner Quotes
If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
Quotes to Explore
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Mr. Fitzgerald, I believe that is how he spells his name, seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.
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I quite like the drama of an encore. I think an encore is for those artists who are inclined to do dramatic gestures, and I certainly would say I am inclined towards them.
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It is hard enough to make a plan for how you are going to spend an evening with somebody else. So to make a plan for how you are going to behave in 25 years seems based on a view of life that is incomprehensible to me.
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Once I turned pro, I was like,' OK, this is not fun and games now. This is me. I'm going to come, and I work on karma. I'm not going to go after somebody if I don't have a reason behind it, so as soon as there is some sort of a reason for me to do something that I need to do, then I'll do it.'
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Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.
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Men, women, and children who cannot live on gravity alone need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours, and he who ministers to this want is, in my opinion, in a business established by the Creator of our nature. If he worthily fulfills his mission and amuses without corrupting, he need never feel that he has lived in vain.
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Not listening to people who care about you, not to be open or transparent, will make you isolated.
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To communicate the truths of history is an act of hope for the future.
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I was not a rebellious teenager. I was a sit-in-your-room teenager.
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The idea of us telling a story where a character doesn't get everything he wants at the end is one of the relatable things - dealing with failures and missteps in life - and it's something that's so rarely dealt with in movies, especially kids' movies.
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There are rumors that we want to move back to the U.K., but we're so happy in America I actually can't see us ever leaving... People ask me how long it took to adapt. Twenty minutes.
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You can't change anyone else, but people do change in relationship to your change.
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I'm very sad 'Life' wasn't a big hit, But it was undone by politics at NBC. It was intense. I moved my wife, and we had two children back to back. So working those hours and living abroad in L.A. was a handful. But it was a great experience.
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I'm not going to do a song that's really sad and thoughtful. Although I've done ballads like 'Dear Darlin',' I want to make them dance and be happy.
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'Ray Donovan' is very dark and very serious. As actors will tell you, the darker and more serious the material, the more jokes that go around set. It's a counterbalance.
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Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all the time thing. You don't win once in a while... you don't do things right once in a while... you do them right all the time. Winning is habit.
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I'm always sad to leave paradise, but I leave behind the hopes of coming again soon.
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To be understood is to prostitute yourself.
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Men no longer prefer blondes. Today gentlemen seem to prefer gentlemen.
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In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special.
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Faith is not to be contrasted with knowledge: faith (at least in paradigmatic instances) is knowledge, knowledge of a certain special kind.
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Life is a difficult game. You can win it only by retaining your birthright to be a person.
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If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
