99+ Ben Fountain Quotes on Fatherhood, Americana and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Ben Fountain quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our Ben Fountain quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Ben Fountain wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Fatherhood, Americana and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Is this what they mean by courage? Simple doing all the things you were trained to do, albeit everything at once and very fast.

If you want to write, then write; if you don’t want to write, then don’t write. I fell into the former category, and I just made the decision that I’d keep on because I liked it and might someday do something decent.

I thought when I started writing that I’d have a book out in four or five years, and as it became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen, I became increasingly frustrated and unsure of myself.

Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die.

From about the age of 15 or 16 I’d had the notion that I wanted to write fiction, and I’d done enough in college to satisfy myself that I had a knack for it – I wouldn’t call it “talent” – though I wondered if I’d ever have the guts to actually commit to it.

Society may not need you, strictly speaking, but some sort of use can usually be found.

I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.

I never listen to music when I’m writing.

Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration – poetry, novels, music, dancing – if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.

I think if you spend much time dwelling on influence you can get self-conscious about every line you write. That’s a great way to freeze up.

I started publishing stories in small magazines early on, but after seven or eight or nine years you feel like you need a little more than that to show for your efforts.

I got brilliant stories from people who’d never set foot in an MFA program and had published very little, and terrible stories from people who’d published a lot and had all the credentials. It was all over the map and that was part of the fun.

It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me – that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.

I kept going back while I was writing the novel – which never sold, may it rest in peace – and by the time it was finished I had too many connections to Haiti to walk away.

Eruptions of talent continue to happen in Haiti, in spite of everything.

I realized I was never going to have any peace with myself unless I made an honest stab at trying to write.

I’m ashamed and embarrassed to say that I’ve read very little of David Foster Wallace’s work. It’s a huge gap in my education, one of many.

If a person wants to be of any use to himself, he better insist on getting his fair share of beauty and pleasure, and if there’s something about the system that’s keeping him from getting his share, then I think he’s well within his rights to fight to change that.

I really had to decide why I was writing. I had no interest in going back to law; I very briefly – for about six hours – considered going to get my MBA, but in the end, I realized that the only work I really wanted to do was write.

If you could figure out how to live with family then you’d gone a long way toward finding your peace.

I quit law in 1988 to start writing, and it took me 17 years from that point to get a book contract. I guess you can say I was on the slow train.

It’s amazing what happens when you stick yourself in a place and let things take their more or less natural course.

Haiti is unique – the first successful slave revolt in history, the first black republic etc., and then when you get into the culture, the voodoo, and that wonderful synchretization of Christian and African belief and symbology, it’s like nothing the world has ever seen.

The smartest thing I did in law school: asking my future wife to go out dancing with me. The smartest thing I did when practicing law: quitting. The smartest thing I’ve done in writing: following my own head and writing what I wanted to write, and nothing but.

The funny thing is, about the time I let go of any aspiration toward worldly success, that’s about the time I started writing decent work.

Maybe the light’s at the other end of the tunnel.

By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.

How does anyone ever know anything – the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation.

Bush, Cheney, Rove, all those guys, they just did what everybody else was doing and I was right there with ’em, chicken as anybody. My problem now is how tough and gung-ho they are, all that bring-it-on crap, I mean, Jesus, show a little humility, people. They ought to be just as careful of your young lives as they were with their own.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

money shaves off a good ten years.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

So what does it mean for a person to devote himself or herself to, as you put it, “literary reading and thinking”? I would argue this is a person who’s trying to see things for what they are. Who’s interested in distinguishing the truth from the lies, the real from the fake, the solid from the cheap. Those are the people who want to think for themselves, and I really question whether we can make good lives for ourselves if we aren’t doing our own thinking.

Literature Quotes

Billy offers small hums of agreement and waits for the momma-logue to wind down.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

the gentle Kathryn thumps the engagement ring in his face, thumps it as you’d thump a spider

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

The men, who lumber around with Cowboys jerseys hanging past their coattails and their pants bagged around the heels of their boots, a fatal foreshortening of vertical line that makes them look like a bunch of hulking twelve-year-olds.

If a bullet’s going to get you, it’s already been fired.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

And Billy, if it’ll ease your mind any, I want you to know you’ve got a standing offer to come work for me when you’re done with your military service. All you’ve got to do is say the word.” Now there was a depressing thought, although Billy could see how it might come to that, assuming best-case scenario he made it home with all his limbs and faculties intact.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

...the Revolution had reached that classic mature stage where it existed only for its own sake.

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories Quotes

I think sometimes nothing is better than something. I mean, I’d rather have nothing than let this guy use me like his bitch.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

I practiced law for five years and that gives you insight into a certain mind-set that maybe a lot of writers haven’t had firsthand access to. There’s an almost casual cruelty, a very low level of overall awareness, but sometimes there’s also knowledge that real damage is being done—this attitude of “Oh, what the hell,” this kind of moral cognitive dissonance. These are people who have never missed a meal. It’s an unknowingness, an unawareness . . . Many people were operating from a very narrow range of experience, and yet they had complete faith in it. Their way was the correct way, the only way. They had virtually no awareness of any other way of life except in terms of demonizing things . . . It’s an extremely blindered experience of the world.

Writers on writing Quotes

. . . any one episode, or even moment, in a person’s life is so complex, with so many layers of past and present, desire and indifference, drift and drive, consciousness and unconsciousness, that language is the best means we’ve found of approaching that kind of complexity.

Writers on writing Quotes

Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Next thing she knows she’s lying flat on her back and three grizzled Mexicans are standing over her, trying

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

It's going to be a long, lonesome eleven months in Iraq, long and lonesome being the best-case scenario

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

A young man needs to know where he stands in the world, not just as a matter of basic human dignity but as determinants in the ways and means of survival, and what you might hope to gain by application of honest effort—

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

It's an important thing and a necessary thing as a writer to always be reaching outside of yourself. They say write what you know. But what you know is rarely enough. You need to know more. But you've got to approach it with a lot of respect and humility. You owe it to the people and experience you're trying to understand. It's not a casual thing.

Writers on writing Quotes

It’s been hard times in America—how did we get this way? So scared all the time,

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Over the years I've come to realize that in a broad sense I'm interested in power and politics. I'm interested in how individuals try to eke out some wiggle room within these large institutions . . . how they eke out some measure of freedom and personal space and integrity . . . trying to negotiate their way toward some sort of, if not happiness, then at least accommodation or peace with themselves.

Writers on writing Quotes

have you not had your morning glass of shut up?

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

They want words. They want contact. They want pictures and autographs. Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all,

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

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