Ben Lerner Quotes

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

Ben Lerner

• Fiction
• Genre
• Human Capacity

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Quotes to Explore

• Fear is... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.

  

  Karen Thompson Walker
  • Fear
  • Kind
  • Born

• My stage name is actually my nickname given to me by my dad when I was a baby.

  

  OMI
  • Me
  • Dad
  • Baby

• A friend is someone who will allow me to be a really bad friend and not hold it against me.

  

  Ted Danson
  • Bad
  • Me
  • Friend

• Neutrality, as a lasting principle, is an evidence of weakness.

  

  Lajos Kossuth
  • Evidence
  • Weakness

• 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.

  

  A. S. Byatt
  • Up
  • Different
  • Painting

• 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.

  

  Dana Priest
  • Learn
  • Goal
  • Impossible

• 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.

  

  Zoe Kazan
  • Writing
  • School
  • Job

• 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.

  

  Carlene Carter
  • Play
  • Stuff
  • Grandma

• What America needs is not Robin Hood but Adam Smith.

  

  Rand Paul
  • America
  • Needs
  • Hood

• Our cast and crew strive for this show after show hard as they can. It shows in the finished product.

  

  Vic Morrow
  • Show
  • Product
  • Strive

• 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.

  

  Calvin Harris
  • People
  • Live
  • Power

• It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.

  

  Felix Frankfurter
  • Man
  • Wise
  • Inequality

• 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.

  

  Quentin Tarantino
  • Live
  • Love
  • Fun

• 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.

  

  Natasha Leggero
  • Good
  • Music
  • Think

• Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains.

  

  Ramana Maharshi
  • See
  • Go
  • Let Go

• 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.

  

  Nathalie Sarraute
  • People
  • Art
  • Attention

• 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.

  

  Patricia Ireland
  • Time
  • Women
  • Christian

• I like the songwriting. I don't ever listen and then go back and change stuff. For me when I wrote the song, it's always really fun and exciting.

  

  Chris Owen
  • Fun
  • Song
  • Stuff

• Those who want to perpetuate apartheid also seek to divert your attention to the false issue of communism, to send the entire American public on a witch hunt.

  

  Oliver Tambo
  • American
  • Want
  • Attention

• I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.

  

  Ben Lerner
  • American
  • Liar
  • Violent

• It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

  

  Ray Bradbury
  • Legacy
  • Lifetime
  • Touching

• When I say my work is travel, that's what I'm doing. And part of being biracial and multicultural is I'm always playing with genre and genre expectations. So even if I say I'm doing straight memoir, you'll see that I'm doing weird stuff with the structure. I've got images, I've got lyrics, and I've got journalism. I really try to not get stuck in genre expectations.

  

  Faith Adiele
  • Travel
  • Lyrics
  • Expectations

• I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

  

  Ben Lerner
  • Fiction
  • Genre
  • Human Capacity