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“Et Tu, Babe” was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer’s life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing, it’s my whole life.

Mark Leyner

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Mark Leyner
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Jersey City
New Jersey
Life
Absolute
Writer
Reading
Happy
Insular
Born
Babe
Whole
Solitary
Writing
Certainty
Love
Absolutes

More quotes by Mark Leyner

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When you are a child, you often stare too closely at the wrong thing. I remember the first time I was taken to Yankee Stadium. Someone had spilled something sweet earlier in the day and the ground was covered with ants. I spent the whole game staring at the ants, and that was more fascinating than the game.
Mark Leyner
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I'm fascinated with video games, though I can't really play them. It's definitely an art form that intrigues me to no end, though.
Mark Leyner
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I've always wanted to be a poet at the beginning. I would look at my grandparents' books and my parents' books. And in my family, a typical aspirational Jewish family, being a writer was very much exalted, and it seemed impossible to me, that I could ever do something like that.
Mark Leyner
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I dont walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. Its worse than bleak, its apocalyptic.
Mark Leyner
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In me, speaking psychologically, there is always an ongoing struggle between my enormously self-regarding, almost delusionally aspirational, Napoleonic personality and a marginalized one.
Mark Leyner
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My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.
Mark Leyner
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I think to simply make fun of something isn't particularly interesting. I try to not just do a parody of something or belittle something or disparage something.
Mark Leyner
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I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.
Mark Leyner
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It's in great joy that we grasp truth.
Mark Leyner
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I always thought of my work as being animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity.
Mark Leyner
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My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.
Mark Leyner
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I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look.
Mark Leyner
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Sometimes I think my purpose is as a saboteur when I'm working with other people, derailing what they're trying to do or taking things to a ludicrous extremity.
Mark Leyner
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People have no idea how much work it is for a man to produce an ejaculation. You have this seminal vesicle churning out this fluid, the prostate gland producing an alkaline solution. It's like having five iron chefs in your crotch working to cook up this stuff.
Mark Leyner
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People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.
Mark Leyner
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My idea with my work is always to fashion something that's impossible to transpose into any other media.
Mark Leyner
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You are fiercely heterosexual and well-formed, and it's no one's business that you've shrunk your parents and keep them in a terranium, but you have a gatling gun for a mouth, and if that's a diary you're producing from your cleavage, I'm leaving.
Mark Leyner