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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.

Ben Marcus

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Ben Marcus
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: October 11
Author
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Feelings
Enormous
Book
Supposed
Work
Negative
Think
Darkness
Thinking
Fans
Like
Books
Thomas
Feeling
Relentless
Sense
Pursuit

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Slamming the book shut produces a wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.
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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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Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.
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My goal, with whatever I'm working on, is to lose track of time.
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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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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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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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Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.
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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 parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.
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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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It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.
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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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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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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.
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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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Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.
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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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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.
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