“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.” … Read More
“I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.” Ben Lerner
“The scare quotes burn off like fog.” Ben Lerner
“Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.” Ben Lerner
“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 … Read More
“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 … Read More
“I usually see the word “metafiction” applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention … Read More
“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 … Read More
“Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do – really felt like I had to do if … Read More
“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 … Read More
“My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes … Read More
“Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.” Ben Lerner
“I didn’t want to write another book about fraudulence.” Ben Lerner
“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 … Read More
“I’m increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all … Read More
“Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.” Ben Lerner
“Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.” Ben Lerner
“When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that “eye black” stuff sometimes – that kind of grease you put … Read More
“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 … Read More
“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 … Read More
