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Quote by 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 into the past.”

Quote by Ben Lerner

Author

Ben Lerner, born on February 4, 1979, is an American poet known for his unique style and profound reflections on contemporary social issues. more

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“I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.”

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“The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.”

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

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“The problem is that if you're self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn't something lost - some kind of presence? You're distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.”

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“Calmness is the cradle of power.”

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“I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.”

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“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.”

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“I'm trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.”

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“I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experiences themselves - might become material for art. This kind of transformation shows up a lot in 10:04 because the book tracks the transposition of fact into fiction in the New Yorker stor”

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“Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways - there's no division between the art object and what surrounds it.”

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