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My goal, with whatever I'm working on, is to lose track of time.

Ben Marcus

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Ben Marcus
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: October 11
Author
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Track
Lose
Loses
Working
Goal
Whatever
Time

More quotes by Ben Marcus

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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.
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Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.
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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.
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Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.
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A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.
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My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.
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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.
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I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
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Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.
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A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
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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.
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I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.
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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.
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Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.
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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.
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It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.
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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.
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Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
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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.
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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