Ben Lerner

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

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.

— Ben Lerner

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

“What you need to do is harness the self-love you are hypostasizing as offspring, as the next generation of you, and let…

— Ben Lerner

“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

“And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I…

— Ben Lerner

“Part of what makes the book bizzare is that Whitman, because he wants to stand for everyone, because he wants to be…

— Ben Lerner

I didn't want to write another book about fraudulence.

— Ben Lerner

The problem is that if you're self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn't something lost - some kind…

— Ben Lerner

Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had…

— Ben Lerner

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive…

— Ben Lerner

“Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the…

— Ben Lerner

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism…

— 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…

— Ben Lerner

“I’m going to kill the president. I promise. I surrender. I'm sorry. I'm gay. I'm pregnant. I'm dying. I'm not your father.…

— Ben Lerner

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

The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the…

— Ben Lerner

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and…

— Ben Lerner

In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and…

— Ben Lerner

“I turned off the projector and Alex mumbled something in her sleep and turned over. I said, "Everything is fine, I'm going…

— Ben Lerner

“The chicken is a little dry and/or you've ruined my life.”

— Ben Lerner

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats…

— Ben Lerner

I'm trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in…

— Ben Lerner

When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of…

— Ben Lerner

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

— Ben Lerner