Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.
Ben LernerThe story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.
Ben LernerI think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.
Ben LernerI'm trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.
Ben LernerI have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.
Ben Lerner