Ben Lerner Quotes
I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
Quotes to Explore
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Fear is... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.
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My stage name is actually my nickname given to me by my dad when I was a baby.
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A friend is someone who will allow me to be a really bad friend and not hold it against me.
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Neutrality, as a lasting principle, is an evidence of weakness.
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You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.
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My goal, as always, is simply to inform the public about an issue that is nearly impossible for them to learn about on their own. That is my only goal as a reporter.
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I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn't get a job, so I wrote a play.
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I wood-shedded for a year to play Grandma's simple stuff. It's not that simple, and I don't use picks the way she does. But I played them as authentically as I could, with the flat-picking.
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What America needs is not Robin Hood but Adam Smith.
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Our cast and crew strive for this show after show hard as they can. It shows in the finished product.
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Even if you have a big tune, live crowds can get sick of it. It's not just about the song but also the staying power and if people have connected with it in a certain way. I know that the tracks I put more emotion and depth into are the ones that have the staying power in clubs.
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It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
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I want to have the fun of doing anime and I love anime, but I can't do storyboards because I can't really draw and that's what they live and die on.
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The corporations are shoving just the worst music down everybody's throats, and I think the result of that is that nobody has any taste. They have no bar as to what is good.
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Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains.
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It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles.
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The Young Women's Christian Association is nourished by its roots in Christianity and, at the same time, over the years, it's been enriched by beliefs and values from all kinds of places, even, in fact, strengthened by our diversity.
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There is no great difference in reality between one country and another, because it is always people you meet everywhere. They may look different or be dressed differently, they may have a different education or position; but they are all the same. They are all people to be loved.
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When you're dealing with TV and with movies, people dont take it as serious as they do with music. If a rapper does a song about shooting people on the block, and goes into a restaurant or grocery store, people grab their purses because they're afraid the person is violent. With TV and movies, people know it's okay, it's just a script.
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One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.
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There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
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I feel engaged with young people in Pakistan. But that said, it's still a small minority that reads novels, literary fiction. But it isn't necessarily a small minority of the wealthy elite in the city of Lahore. It can often be and I often do meet at literary festivals students who've ridden a bus 12 hours from a very small town just to hear some of their favorite writers come and speak.
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I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
