Ben Lerner

Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.

— Ben Lerner

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

— Ben Lerner

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

— Ben Lerner

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

— Ben Lerner

I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.

— Ben Lerner

“You are the first and last indigenous Nintendo.”

— Ben Lerner

“I could imagine it in a way that felt like remembering”

— Ben Lerner

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

— Ben Lerner

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

— Ben Lerner

“The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,” I said, meaninglessly.”

— Ben Lerner

Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.

— Ben Lerner

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

— Ben Lerner

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

— Ben Lerner

“What normally felt like the only possible world became one among many”

— Ben Lerner

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

— Ben Lerner

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

— Ben Lerner

“My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that’s all I’d ever really…

— Ben Lerner

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

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

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of…

— 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

Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in…

— Ben Lerner

I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world…

— Ben Lerner

Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times -…

— 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

I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how…

— Ben Lerner

“I would like to say that, as the protester finished his shower, I was disturbed by the contradiction between my avowed political…

— Ben Lerner

I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the…

— 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

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

— 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

“And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when…

— 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

“But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where…

— Ben Lerner

“I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the…

— Ben Lerner

“Mad Lib Elegy" There are starving children left on your plate. There are injuries without brains. Migrant workers spend 23 hours a…

— Ben Lerner

The strange thing about the apocalypse is that it's uneven. For some people, it goes one way and for others another way,…

— Ben Lerner

“She said she hoped she would see me again, and the next thing I knew I was running through light snow back…

— Ben Lerner

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