Quotes by Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass “conceptualism” that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

Contemporary Fiction

Historical

Past

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

California

Firefly

West Coast

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 or novels.

Criticism

Fiction

Writing

Fiction doesn’t appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters – neither that kind of “realism” of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.

Character

Depth

Psychology

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

Lost

Novelists

Want

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine.

Important

Reading

White

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

Book

Want

Writing

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” and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it’s already happened.

Fiction

Mind

Thinking

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 have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn’t imply people aren’t multi-dimensional.

Fiction

People

Thinking

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature’s ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

Contemporary Fiction

Literature

Thinking

Follow The Behaviour University in order to get the greatest quotes from the greatest people of all time so that you can tap into your own greatness.

Art

Astronaut

Attention

Awe

Awe Inspiring

Believe

Bipolar

Book

Building

California

Cases

Changed

Character

Contemporary Fiction

Criticism

Cutting

Depth

Dream

Exciting

Feelings

Fiction

Firefly

Fog

Historical

Ideas

Important

Kind

Liars

Light

Literature

Logic

Lost

Mean

Medical

Mind

Moving

Novel

Novelists

Octopus

Order

Past

People

Powerful

Psychology

Reading

Real

Reality

Self

Shaving

Sides

The Future Blueprint

Tool

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

Tool

The Autobiography

Tool

The Behaviour Diary

Tool

The Dating Diary

Tool

The Relationship Therapist

Tool

Quotes by Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass “conceptualism” that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

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

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 or novels.

Fiction doesn’t appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters – neither that kind of “realism” of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.

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

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine.

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

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” and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it’s already happened.

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 have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn’t imply people aren’t multi-dimensional.

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature’s ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

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