Ben Lerner Quotes

As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next.

There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel - it's that postmodern thing - it's more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being's experience.

In terms of graphic versus prose, I could probably do a lecture on that topic. But what stood out most was the difference in pacing the language and resulting scenes. One illustration can do so much for the reader.

I don't like books, they're all fact, no heart.

In a book, you can kind of take time and have lulls in places.

You need to have a reader's sympathy in order to accomplish anything. It's like at a reading, I find it's better to read something funny than to read something tragic. It just goes over better because you have a finite amount of time with somebody. Of course, in a book, you have a lot of time. But you still do want to make a certain impression right when you begin.

When you pick up a script and you can't stop reading it because it's a real page-turner, that's a good sign.

If a script has that affect on me during a reading, then it is definitely a film I want to be part of.

[In the moment of reading writer and reader] are both briefly their best selves, or at least better selves. A flawed human being writes something and 60 years later a reader picks up the book and something in them rises to meet it.

What they frequently want to do with a movie is, they want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks. And valleys are important; the valleys make the peaks stand out.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.

We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having "completed" them.

I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that.

But, you have to watch them in order. That's very important because, as it turns out, stories have to be told in order. It's like reading a novel. There are times when it's tiring. And then, you get hooked and it's a page-turner, and you really want to keep reading. I do think there will be some fatigue that sets in.

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

in reading ... stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.

I'm very expressive. Expressing my emotions and experiences through music has always been an important outlet for me. Many of my songs are influenced by personal events and experiences that I have gone through.

If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?