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Ben Lerner Biography

Benjamin S. Lerner (born February 4, 1979) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the National Book Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and he is currently a MacArthur Fellow. In 2011 he won the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie", making him the first American to receive this honor. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

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Ben Lerner Quotes

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.

Appeal, Character, Characters, Depth, Depths, Psychology

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.

Fiction, Fictions, Narrative, Real, World

Your interviews or blog posts or whatever are less supplements to your novel than part of it. I'm not private, but I believe in literary form - I'll use my life as material for art (I don't know how not to do this) and I'll use art as a way of exploring that passage of life into art and vice versa, but that's not the same thing as thinking that any of the details of my life are interesting or relevant on their own.

Art, Believe, Details, Literary, Thinking, Way

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

Defending, Dying, Fiction, Genre, Literary, Literary Genre

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

Novelists, Want, Lost, Novelist, Claim

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.

Thinking, Mind, Fiction, Publish, Think, Start

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, Light, Color, Music, Stream

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, Lively, Poetry, Short, Writing

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.

Chance, Cutting, Ritually, Shaving, Throat, Way

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.

Distracted, Impressionable, Kind, Perfectly, Self, Trying

I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.

Come, Enabling, Fiction, Fragments, Knowing, 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, Contemporary Fiction, Literature, Posts, Sitcoms, Thinking

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

Cities, Would Be, Way, Sinking, Vulnerable

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

Art, Book, Track, Tracks, Stor

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Burn, Fog, Quotes, Scare

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

Artist, Stupidity, Culture, Commercialized, Affirmative, Fetish

I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds of moments in our daily lives that break - or at least could break - from the logic of profit and the modes of domination it entails. Zones of freedom, even if it's never pure.

Entails, Logic, Modes, Sides, Talking

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

Awe, Awe Inspiring, Confuse, Exciting, Thing, Transpersonal

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.

Construction, Fiction, Novel, Stories, Writing, Yorker

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.

Ari, Book, Couple, Determining, Real

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