Quotes by Ben Marcus

About Ben Marcus:

Ben Marcus is the author of four books of fiction. His latest book, Leaving the Sea: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in January 2014.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.

Ben Marcus

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...

Ben Marcus

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.

Ben Marcus

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

In certain strains of Judaism, there's a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, our tiny minds can't possibly comprehend Him. If we find ourselves comprehending Him, then we can be ...

Ben Marcus

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.

Ben Marcus

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.

Ben Marcus

I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.

Ben Marcus

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

Ben Marcus

Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

Ben Marcus

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

Ben Marcus

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.

Ben Marcus

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.

Ben Marcus

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.

Ben Marcus

Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …

Ben Marcus

The true elitists in the literary world are the ones who have become annoyed by literary ambition in any form, who have converted the very meaning of ambition so totally that it now registers as an act of disdain, a hostility to the poor common reade...

Ben Marcus

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

Ben Marcus

It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.

Ben Marcus

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.

Ben Marcus

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

Author Bio

  • NameBen Marcus
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornOctober 11, 1967
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor