I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre. — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
I don't think it's always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
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"… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come,… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
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… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance. — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
“What you need to do is harness the self-love you are hypostasizing as offspring, as the next generation of you, and let it branch… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
“And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation,” — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
“And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
“Part of what makes the book bizzare is that Whitman, because he wants to stand for everyone, because he wants to be less a… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
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?… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
“Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between… — Ben Lerner Copy Share Image
