Ben Marcus Quotes
Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.
Being with him was like being alone underwater - everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.
It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.
It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours.
Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them.
In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.
I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.
Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.
To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.
I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.
To me one of the amazing technologies of writing is the way it can listen in on thoughts. I don't feel that that's natural to other art forms in the same way.
Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need.
Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.
Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.
I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.
My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.
Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.
I'm interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or 'explains,' the larger mysteries of religion.
Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I've written and throwing it away.
Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren't.
Perhaps they didn't know they were at sea. Was there a certain percentage of people at sea who lacked the knowledge that they were at sea?
Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.
My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else.
Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while.
Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …
I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can't. I have failed to destroy my category.
It was hard not to realize what kind of kid his parents wished they'd had, and when he thought about that kind of kid it was tempting for Paul to want to track, hunt, and eat the little thing.
What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?
