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Quote by Ben Lerner

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

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 think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.”

Thinking Way Light Political Pleasure Silence Sky Color Storm Bridges Streams Tails

Author: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 than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.”

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“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.”

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

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“When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.”

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“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.”

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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.”

Ifs Want Should Lost Claims Novelists

Author:Ben Lerner

“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.”

Ifs Trying Kind Persons Self Problem Lost Conscious Distracted Self Conscious Impressionable

Author:Ben Lerner