Al Lerner Quotes

But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

I could have danced all night!

An Englishmans way of speaking absolutely classifies him.

Thank heaven for little girls! For little girls get bigger every day.

A schedule so tight that it would only work if I didn't sleep on Monday nights.

What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.

I'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.

The 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.

Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.

Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.

I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.

I didn't want to write another book about fraudulence.

I 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.

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.

The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person.

... but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

Science works as a way to make sense of life and the universe. Hard SF as my preferred fictional genre just feels natural.

The scope of what I have to say determines the length of what I write.

One doesn't just wander unvetted into someone else's epic interstellar future history.

Collaboration is a nice change of pace from the often solitary nature of the writer's craft.

No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human.

Nothing you say can ensure that the other person will get it, or respond the way you want. You may never exceed his threshold of deafness.

the body, seeking truth, sends a signal. But decoding it, interpreting its meaning, and knowing how to proceed from there is another matter entirely.

Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.

If you pursue a distancer, he or she will distance more. Consider it a fundamental law of physics.

Fear has never helped anybody make good choices. It leads to clinging when we should be walking.

We commonly confuse closeness with sameness and view intimacy as the merging of two separate I's into one worldview.

As many have observed, it is easy to tell a lie, but it is almost impossible to tell only one.

Kids want nothing more than for all the important adults in their life to get along.

It's remarkable how many couples can precisely describe their particular pattern of painful fighting, and claim to be helpless to change it.

Believing that all women should want to be mothers makes about as much sense as believing that all men should want to be engineers.

Being in touch with our bodies, or more accurately, being our bodies, is how we know what is true. Harriet

Self-help books for women are part of a multibillion-dollar industry, sensitively attuned to our insecurities and our purses.

As long as we can feel hope, there is hope.

deception and 'con games' are a way of life in all species and throughout nature. Organisms that do not improve their ability to deceive - and to detect deception - are less apt to survive.

When anxiety disrupts functioning, it's psychiatric illness.

We have to change from 'ego-architecture' to 'eco-architecture.'

Every city in the world can be improved in less than three years.

The design of a city is like a strange archeology.

There is a hate layer of opinion and emotion in America. There will be other McCarthys to come who will be hailed as its heroes.

America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner.