Ben Lerner Quotes

Every filmmaker knows that when you make a book into a movie, the first thing you have to do is kill the book, unfortunately. You've got to recreate it.

My career has taken so many different paths to this point that I've come to realise that we're all the same, everywhere I've been. We're all just creatures trying to tell stories as good as we can, so whether that's in a tiny theatre or as part of the biggest multi-million dollar film, we're all still just trying to tell a good story at the end of the day.

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.

for my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated.

I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe.

I think jazz and comic books are probably the two uniquely American art forms.

A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.

I see all art as a complement to telling people's stories. I'm in the storytelling business. I believe that the humanity that all of us share is the stories of our lives, and everybody has a story. Your story is as important as the next person's story.

Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.

The book is not the important part. The book is the delivery system. The important part is the story and the talent.

There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.

A work of art is like a person: it has more than one soul in its breast.

Art does not imitate, but interpret.

Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

It's important to be yourself. What art does for everyone, helps you understand yourself and in a distilled way, whether it's a painting or a scene in acting or a joke. It distills something about everyday life that can be important to you.

I have not tried to reproduce nature; I have represented it.

All art is an abstraction to some degree.

Language is what books do very well and movement is what movies does very well.

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms.

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - just paint Spring.

(Art is) the residue of vision.

One day, in the San Francisco walk, he came upon some badly painted figures and observed that good painters imitate nature but bad ones vomit it forth.