Ben Lerner Quotes
-
That they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they’re not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children, since America is adolescence without end, boys without religion on the one hand or a charismatic leader on the other; they don’t even have a father—President Carter!—to kill or a father to tell them to kill the Jew; they have no Jew; they are libidinally driven to mass surrender without anything to surrender to; they don’t even believe in money or in science, or those beliefs are insufficient; their country has fought and lost its last real war; in a word, they are overfed; in a word, they are starving. These kids, Klaus said, just need a good whipping and some physical labor; these kids, Klaus also said, are undergoing a profound archaic regression.
-
I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former.
-
A "poem" is understood as something referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures.
-
Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.
-
I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.
-
Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent.
-
The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
-
You are the first and last indigenous Nintendo.
-
My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that’s all I’d ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.
-
Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself and gaze back, an important trick because the goal is to be on both sides of the poem, shuttling between the you and I.
-
I don't think it's always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn't imply people aren't multi-dimensional.
-
Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.
-
I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.
-
But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.
-
Her breath smelled terrible and I told myself to commit that fact to memory, to remember it the next time I was intimidated by her unwavering grace.
-
Your interviews or blog posts or whatever are less supplements to your novel than part of it. I'm not private, but I believe in literary form - I'll use my life as material for art (I don't know how not to do this) and I'll use art as a way of exploring that passage of life into art and vice versa, but that's not the same thing as thinking that any of the details of my life are interesting or relevant on their own.
-
On the one hand, Klaus, surely the only man in Topeka outfitted in white linen, could not take these kids—with their refrigerators full of food, their air-conditioning and television, their freedom from stigma or state violence—seriously; what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout?
-
I don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened.
-
I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.
-
In 1903 the scientists found out that the brontosaurus was a fake! They realized that the brontosaurus was really an apatosaurus with the wrong head. However, although the scientists realized their mistake, most people didn’t know about their new discovery. Many people thought that the brontosaurus still existed because museums kept using the name on their labels—and because the brontosaurus was really, really popular! So even though the scientists discovered their error, most of us didn’t know.
-
All these lacrimal events and bouts of depersonalization were no doubt leading, I was then convinced, to the onset of schizophrenia. Indeed, the irony of my recent cardiac diagnosis was that it gave me an objective reason for my emotional turbulences and so was, in that sense, stabilizing: now I was reckoning with a specific existential threat, not just the vacuum of existence.
-
What normally felt like the only possible world became one among many.
-
I’m going to kill the president. I promise. I surrender. I'm sorry. I'm gay. I'm pregnant. I'm dying. I'm not your father. You're fired. Fire. I forgot your birthday. You will have to lose the leg. She was asking for it. It ran right under the car. It looked like a gun. It's contagious. She’s with God now. Help me. I don't have a problem. I’ve swallowed a bottle of aspirin. I'm a doctor. I'm leaving you. I love you. Fuck you. I’ll change.
-
Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.