Latest Ben Marcus Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• To me one of the amazing technologies of writing is the way it can listen in on thoughts. I don't feel that that's natural to other art forms in the same way.

  Ben Marcus

  Art, Writing, Technology

• Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I've written and throwing it away.

  Ben Marcus

  Teaching, Writing, Thinking

• With students, one is often in the position where you have to be authoritative about what they're doing and connected to some principle. I prefer not really knowing the answer to anything interesting and I try to encourage that in teaching. If I start to feel certain about something my curiosity goes away, my mind shuts down. I'm sure that's not always true, it's stupid to generalise.

  Ben Marcus

  Stupid, Teaching, Interesting

• Family seems so rich and complicated to me. There's meant to be this unfailing biological loyalty and yet at the same time it's this theatre for various kinds of cruelty. I know it doesn't always work out that way, but the worst possible behaviour is sort of allowed for. It looks to me like an endlessly rich container for really terrible drama, but also pretty grand love. It accommodates such a variety of feeling in such a natural way, and it feels so relatable, and yet it's such a funny construct, socially, the family.

  Ben Marcus

  Loyalty, Drama, Work Out

• I don't like real places, but I don't like imagined ones either. I feel like I'm looking for some mixture and it's very hard for me to say because I like to use real place names because there's an uncanny feeling to them, but at the same time I don't ever really try to make them plausible. Sometimes I like to use them as a way to hide in plain sight a little bit, because to me a very exotic or imagined setting has a lot of weight and a lot of burden to it, and it doesn't suit me, but a real place seems to have its own weird legacy, so I don't know what the choice is?

  Ben Marcus

  Real, Choices, Feelings

• I always, at least back then, struggled with emotion in writing. I felt like I could do odd, unusual things, but there wouldn't be enough feeling in them, and maybe if there's a progression at all to anything that I've done it's that I've always wanted to have a high - an almost overwhelming - degree of feeling in what I write.

  Ben Marcus

  Writing, Feelings, Done

• Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

  Ben Marcus

  Fiction, Complicated, Breaking Down

  "'A reading list is not my trophy case.' An Interview with Ben Marcus About His Syllabus". Interview with Stephanie Palumbo, logger.believermag.com. June 24, 2014.