Ben Lerner – Quotes

Just in case God

Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms. Ben Lerner

The scare quotes burn

The scare quotes burn off like fog. Ben Lerner

The story and the

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

Henry James claim that

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

I’m trying to be

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

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 … Read more

Maybe now if you’re

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

Your interviews or blog

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 … Read more

Fiction doesn’t appeal to

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

I don’t think it’s

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