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

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

— Ben Lerner

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

— Ben Lerner

Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability"…

— 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

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of…

— Ben Lerner

I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across…

— Ben Lerner

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

— Ben Lerner

“...discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of…

— Ben Lerner

“…the threshold between the hospital and its outside was like a threshold between worlds, between media.”

— 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

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

— Ben Lerner

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

— 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

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

— Ben Lerner

“...it was clear to everyone at the table who had any experience with men and alcohol—especially men who had won international literary…

— 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 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

“When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I…

— 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 could imagine it in a way that felt like remembering”

— Ben Lerner

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative…

— 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

I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come,…

— Ben Lerner