Ben Lerner Quotes
There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.
Quotes to Explore
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Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'
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I want some colleague to be free to come help me when I say the time has come. That's what I'm fighting for, me. Now that sounds selfish. And if it helps somebody else, so be it.
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Spending money is much more difficult than making money.
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I always fall in love with qualities of people I work with.
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Experimental science is fascinating, but I don't want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I'll read about it.
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I've worked so hard for so long, and everyone's reaction has made me feel like... almost like they trust me, which is just a wonderful feeling. It pushes me to write things better and better.
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Everyone should change; otherwise, you can't grow as a person in life.
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I will come up with a project that will wipe out poverty in the Philippines in two years. I want to remove the people from economic crisis by using the Marcos wealth. Long after I'm gone, people will remember me for building them homes and roads and hospitals and giving them food.
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Public appearances are a headache. I hold mine down to a minimum.
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Films, fiction, can encompass a whole global vision on a particular subject with any story, whatever it is. You can play the story in whatever country with whatever language in whatever style you want to tell the story in.
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If I was sad or afraid, I would sit in a corner and sing. If I was happy I would jump into the middle of the room and sing. It was how I expressed my emotions.
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To be here recovers from a state of soul, from a state of mind. I have the memory of the heart. I know what I received. I must have the will to give back to others.
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We worked lightly even in the heaviest parts.
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When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique sense of peace.
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Generally, if I read something that I think is really good and that I feel a connection with and is right for me, I see and hear who the guy is, as manifested by me.
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My friends, who sleep for all eternity; we do not forget you.
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I think it would be hard to go the distance in this business without a sense of humor.
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A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.
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Art is something you can't teach, but you can inspire it.
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For me, the heyday was in 1959. It was before the Ferus Gallery moved across the street, in the days when Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps ran it. At that time, art was taken very seriously in terms of being an artist, and not as a profession.
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She turned to Gansey.'Blue,' he warned, but his voice was chaotic. This close, his throat was scented with mint and wool sweater and vinyl car seat, and Gansey, just Gansey. She said, 'I just want to pretend. I want to pretend that I could.'
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When I was in middle school, some of my so-called friends found a catalog ad I did for Superman pajamas. They made as many copies as they could and pasted them up all over school.
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I did not know what it was to be happy for a whole day at a time, scarcely for an hour.
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There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.
