“It's about being in a race with time - just having a strong sense of mortality, and the idea of, How much time do you have left? How do you want to spend it? What I always come up with is: keep on writing, keep on working. But you can become sterile. It's become a matter of trying to find inspiration someplace outside of my own head, which I've been using exclusively for too long.” WantWritingTryingLongIdeasMatterInspirationLeftStrongMy OwnRaceCome UpMortality Author:Joe Frank
“There's the larger shiny Marvel universe where everybody has new gear and it's all made of chrome and leather. And then there's Deadpool. I think the world that he explores is a much seedier, everyday sort of ordinary type world. But he still lives in that universe. It still has to sit next to all these other films.” ThinkingWorldMadeStillsFilmUniverseNextTypeOrdinaryEverydayLeatherGearsStill LifeChrome Author:Timothy Miller
“I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.” ShowsRealityOrderAttentionDrawsDevicesConventionsImpossibilityMockArtificiality Author:Ben Lerner
“Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.” IfsWritingWantedMovingFeltNovelPositionIronySincerity Author:Ben Lerner
“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
“Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.” SawsWestCaliforniaCoastFireflyWest Coast Author:Ben Lerner
“When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of grease you put under your eyes to reduce glare or something. We only used it, of course, to look cool; it's not like we were any better prepubescent athletes for reducing glare.” LooksKindSometimesUseEyeKidsUsedCoursesStuffBlackBaseballAthleteReducingGreaseGlare Author:Ben Lerner
“I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing - a kind of night vision.” KindDreamBodyEyeRememberFacesNightGamesBlackVisionGlowingRecurringFireflyNight VisionRecurring Dreams Author:Ben Lerner
“I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it's an antidote to despair.” IfsThinkingWorldWayStillsIdeasReasonPowerfulOne ThingDespairRedemptionPeculiarAntidoteParables Author:Ben Lerner
