“My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.” WorldRealFactsFictionEffectsConcernNarrativeArrangements Author:Ben Lerner
“Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.” PeopleIfsFirstsMadeTwoBookRealForceNovelCoupleEdgesScratches Author: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, so that there's always this shifting relation to the narrative of the disaster. Sometimes apocalypses are just structural fictions, and sometimes they're real. Sometimes a narrative requires an end - the fact that the beginning was always leading somewhere becomes clear at the end. There's an idea that we're always in the middle, but we posit this apocalyptic end in order to also be able to project into the past or the beginning. I think that's true and false.” PeopleThinkingRealSometimesPastStrangeRelationDisasterApocalypseApocalyptic Author:Ben Lerner
“I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.” RealViolentLiarsBipolarCompulsive Liar Book:Leaving the Atocha Station Source: Leaving the Atocha Station
