Latest Ben Lerner Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The strange thing about the apocalypse is that it's uneven. For some people, it goes one way and for others another way, so that there's always this shifting relation to the narrative of the disaster. Sometimes apocalypses are just structural fictions, and sometimes they're real. Sometimes a narrative requires an end - the fact that the beginning was always leading somewhere becomes clear at the end. There's an idea that we're always in the middle, but we posit this apocalyptic end in order to also be able to project into the past or the beginning. I think that's true and false.

  Ben Lerner

  Real, Past, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.

  Ben Lerner

  Character, Way, Privacy

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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.

  Ben Lerner

  Thinking, People, Fiction

  Source: www.believermag.com

• In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I guess I want to capture that process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals.

  Ben Lerner

  Art, Reading, Offering

  Source: www.believermag.com

• Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.

  Ben Lerner

  Character, Psychology, Depth

  Source: www.believermag.com

• Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.

  Ben Lerner

  Couple, Real, Book

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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.

  Ben Lerner

  Writing, Criticism, Fiction

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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.

  Ben Lerner

  Art, Believe, Thinking

  Source: www.believermag.com

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

  Ben Lerner

  Literary Genre, Dying, Fiction

  Source: www.believermag.com

• I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experiences themselves - might become material for art. This kind of transformation shows up a lot in 10:04 because the book tracks the transposition of fact into fiction in the New Yorker stor

  Ben Lerner

  Art, Book, Track

  Source: www.believermag.com

• Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways - there's no division between the art object and what surrounds it.

  Ben Lerner

  Art, Stupid, People

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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.

  Ben Lerner

  Thinking, Mind, Fiction

  Source: www.believermag.com

• I'm trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.

  Ben Lerner

  Trying, Medical, Lost

  Source: www.believermag.com

• I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.

  Ben Lerner

  Pain, Order, Bored

  Source: www.believermag.com

• The problem is that if you're self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn't something lost - some kind of presence? You're distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.

  Ben Lerner

  Self, Trying, Kind

  Source: www.believermag.com

• The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.

  Ben Lerner

  Stories, Changed, Novel

  Source: www.believermag.com

• Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

  Ben Lerner

  Novelists, Want, Lost

  Source: www.believermag.com

• I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

  Ben Lerner

  Past, Fiction, Building

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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.

  Ben Lerner

  Writing, Fiction, Stories

  Source: www.believermag.com

• The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

  Ben Lerner

  Exciting, Awe Inspiring, Awe

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

• When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.

  Ben Lerner

  Mean, Order, Octopus

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

• 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.

  Ben Lerner

  Past, Contemporary Fiction, Historical

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

• I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.

  Ben Lerner

  Thinking, Light, Color

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

• I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

  Ben Lerner

  Thinking, Contemporary Fiction, Literature

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

• I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

  Ben Lerner

  Artist, Stupidity, Culture

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.