{"author":"Ben Fountain","author_id":"Ben+Fountain","total_quotes":28,"quotes":[{"text":"I like to kill my enemies and listen to the lamentations of their women.","author":"Ben Fountain","tags":["enemies"],"id":10030,"author_id":"Ben+Fountain"},{"text":"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.","author":"Ben Fountain","tags":["writers-on-writing"],"id":26867,"author_id":"Ben+Fountain"},{"text":"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.","author":"Ben Fountain","tags":["writers-on-writing"],"id":30722,"author_id":"Ben+Fountain"},{"text":"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.","author":"Ben Fountain","tags":["art","culture"],"id":71917,"author_id":"Ben+Fountain"},{"text":"If you could figure out how to live with family then you'd gone a long way toward finding your peace.","author":"Ben Fountain","tags":["family-relationships"],"id":87389,"author_id":"Ben+Fountain"},{"text":"As if sorrow is the true reality? Without ever putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory.","author":"Ben Fountain","tags":["loss","reality","sorrow"],"id":87504,"author_id":"Ben+Fountain"},{"text":"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.","author":"Ben Fountain","tags":["literature"],"id":87803,"author_id":"Ben+Fountain"},{"text":"Not that she means anything by it, he knows. This is simply her lifelong habit of moderation at work, her need to tamp everything down to the routine, the modest, the tepid everyday. He understands the whole concept of boundaries, but there’s a point where this mania for normalizing turns toxic.","author":"Ben Fountain","tags":["family","mothers"],"id":101540,"author_id":"Ben+Fountain"},{"text":"Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I’d known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we’re always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we’re doing things we technically don’t know how to do.","author":"Ben Fountain","tags":["fatherhood","life","parenting"],"id":104134,"author_id":"Ben+Fountain"},{"text":"He decides he wants both more or less. He’d like to hang with Beyonce in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things together like playing board games and going out for ice cream, or how about this, a three-week trial run in some tropical paradise where they can hang together in that nice way and possibly fall in love, and meanwhile fuck each other’s brains out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul connect because anything less is just demeaning.","author":"Ben Fountain","tags":["beyonce","falling-in-love"],"id":109966,"author_id":"Ben+Fountain"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":28,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}