Ben Marcus Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Ben Marcus's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Author Ben Marcus's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 41 quotes on this page collected since October 11, 1967! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by Ben Marcus: Books Feelings Language Parents Writing more...
  • 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 work, and then I leave the office, and I'm with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don't feel like I'm exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.

    Kids   Play   Ideas  
  • I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

    Grief   Bigs   Dose  
  • Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

    Grief   Sound   Looks  
    Ben Marcus (2012). “The Flame Alphabet”, p.225, Granta Books
  • Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

    "Ben Marcus: 'Writing has to earn people's interest'". Interview with Killian Fox, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2012.
  • My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

    Book   Age   Wire  
  • The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can't just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.

    Thinking   Hands   Worry  
  • 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.

    "Ben Marcus: 'Writing has to earn people's interest'". Interview with Killian Fox, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2012.
  • I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work - the pursuit of darkness, the negative - and I think in some sense I've internalised that as what one is supposed to do.

    "Ben Marcus: 'Writing has to earn people's interest'". Interview with Killian Fox, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2012.
  • 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.

    Prayer   Rain   Sky  
    Ben Marcus (2007). “Notable American Women: A Novel”, p.55, Vintage
  • I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.

    Thinking   Way  
  • 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.

  • 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.

    Summer   Writing   Kids  
    "Ben Marcus: 'Writing has to earn people's interest'". Interview with Killian Fox, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2012.
  • Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

    "'A reading list is not my trophy case.' An Interview with Ben Marcus About His Syllabus". Interview with Stephanie Palumbo, logger.believermag.com. June 24, 2014.
  • Family seems so rich and complicated to me. There's meant to be this unfailing biological loyalty and yet at the same time it's this theatre for various kinds of cruelty. I know it doesn't always work out that way, but the worst possible behaviour is sort of allowed for. It looks to me like an endlessly rich container for really terrible drama, but also pretty grand love. It accommodates such a variety of feeling in such a natural way, and it feels so relatable, and yet it's such a funny construct, socially, the family.

  • RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.

    Wise   Art   Pain  
    Ben Marcus (2013). “The Age of Wire and String”, p.92, Granta Books
  • 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.

  • Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.

    "This week in fiction: Ben Marcus" by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. May 11, 2013.
  • A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

    Ben Marcus (2007). “Notable American Women: A Novel”, p.54, Vintage
  • 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.

    Children   Parent   Way  
    "This week in fiction:Ben Marcus" by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. May 11, 2013.
  • People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots. At the time of this writing, the whole world is a crime scene: People eat space with their bodies; they are rain decayers; the wind is slaughtered when they move. A retaliation is probably coming. Should a person cease to move, she would cease to kill the sky, and the world might begin to recover.

    Sweet   Mistake   Rain  
    Ben Marcus (2007). “Notable American Women: A Novel”, p.46, Vintage
  • My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.

  • 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.

    Lonely   Passion   Joy  
    "This week in fiction:Ben Marcus" by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. May 11, 2013.
  • Mostly we're motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there's a bit of a lab for bad behavior. You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.

    Motivation   Home   Labs  
    "This week in fiction:Ben Marcus" by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. May 11, 2013.
  • 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.

    Ben Marcus (2012). “The Flame Alphabet”, p.327, Granta Books
  • Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.

    Long   Suspense   Care  
    Ben Marcus (2012). “The Flame Alphabet”, p.269, Vintage
  • Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I'd said that, how many times I'd meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry.

    Love   Sorry   Impact  
    Ben Marcus (2012). “The Flame Alphabet”, p.112, Vintage
  • Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I've written and throwing it away.

  • I always, at least back then, struggled with emotion in writing. I felt like I could do odd, unusual things, but there wouldn't be enough feeling in them, and maybe if there's a progression at all to anything that I've done it's that I've always wanted to have a high - an almost overwhelming - degree of feeling in what I write.

    Writing   Feelings   Done  
  • With students, one is often in the position where you have to be authoritative about what they're doing and connected to some principle. I prefer not really knowing the answer to anything interesting and I try to encourage that in teaching. If I start to feel certain about something my curiosity goes away, my mind shuts down. I'm sure that's not always true, it's stupid to generalise.

Page 1 of 2
  • 1
  • 2
  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 41 quotes from the Author Ben Marcus, starting from October 11, 1967! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Ben Marcus quotes about: Books Feelings Language Parents Writing