Top 81 Ben Fountain Quotes
#1. Don't be scared, Shroom said. Because you're going to be scared. So when you start to get scared, don't be scared.
Ben Fountain
#2. 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.
Ben Fountain
#3. But a lot of the time that's how it works, life gets so dark until we think all the light's gone out of us. But it's there, it's always there. If we just open the door a crack the light comes pouring in.
Ben Fountain
#4. 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.
Ben Fountain
#5. If you could figure out how to live with family then you'd gone a long way toward finding your peace.
Ben Fountain
#6. America loves to pray, God knows. America prays and prays and prays, it is the land of unchained prayer, and all this ceremonial praying is hard on Billy.
Ben Fountain
#7. All the fakeness just rolls right off them, maybe because the nonstop sales job of American life has instilled in them exceptionally high thresholds for sham, puff, spin, bullshit, and outright lies, in other words for advertising in all its forms.
Ben Fountain
#8. So much of life consists of inertia and drift, the brief savory or sour of any particular day tends to blur into the next so that it all becomes one big flavorless wad.
Ben Fountain
#9. 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.
Ben Fountain
#10. So perhaps, it occurs to Billy, this is the whole point of civilization, the eating of beautiful meals and the taking of decorous dumps, in which case he is for it, having had a bellyful of the other way.
Ben Fountain
#11. The gentle Kathryn thumps the engagement ring in his face, thumps it as you'd thump a spider
Ben Fountain
#12. 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.
Ben Fountain
#13. Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul, to be free of it something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a hundred million dollars.
Ben Fountain
#14. 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, and ask every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow.
Ben Fountain
#15. This is a truth so brutally self-evident that he can't fathom why it's not more widely perceived, hence his contempt for the usual public shock and outrage when a particular situation goes to hell
Ben Fountain
#16. The main thing about writing is ... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.
Ben Fountain
#17. She couldn't save them, she couldn't save anyone but herself, which made her presence here the worst sort of self-indulgence, her mission a long-running fantasy.
Ben Fountain
#19. At some point Billy realized he was expecting the president to act, well, embarrassed? Ashamed? For how fucked up everything obviously was. But the commander in chief seemed well pleased with the state of things.
Ben Fountain
#20. Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.
Ben Fountain
#21. Coffee? Hell yes, coffee! Caffeine being one of the essential drugs.
Ben Fountain
#22. 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.
Ben Fountain
#24. God knows the war sucks, but he sees no great appeal in these tepid peacetime lives.
Ben Fountain
#25. Everyone worries, everyone feels at least a little bit doomed basically all the time, even the richest, most successful, most secure among us live in perpetually anxious states of barely hanging on
Ben Fountain
#26. If a bullet's going to get you, it's already been fired.
Ben Fountain
#27. 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.
Ben Fountain
#28. He'd say "I love you" to every man in the squad before rolling out, say it straight, with no joking or smart-ass lilt and no warbly Christian smarm in it either, just that brisk declaration like he was tightening the seat belts around everyone's soul.
Ben Fountain
#29. It's been hard times in America - how did we get this way? So scared all the time,
Ben Fountain
#30. Maybe the light's at the other end of the tunnel.
Ben Fountain
#31. Next thing she knows she's lying flat on her back and three grizzled Mexicans are standing over her, trying
Ben Fountain
#32. It is sort of weird being honored for the worst day of your life.
Ben Fountain
#33. 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.
Ben Fountain
#34. But then self-doubt has always been there for Billy, self-doubt and its cousin the berating voice, these faithful companions have always been on call to help him through the critical junctures of his life.
Ben Fountain
#35. 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.
Ben Fountain
#36. By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.
Ben Fountain
#37. It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me - that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.
Ben Fountain
#38. A harsh thing for any young man to hear, but this is part of every youth's education in the world, learning the risks are never fully revealed until you commit.
Ben Fountain
#39. 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 -
Ben Fountain
#40. The singing triggers a soft detonation at his core, molten parts of him are flying everywhere and his ears ring to the tune of blast harmonics that only he can hear, but what is "The Star Spangled Banner" if not a love song?
Ben Fountain
#41. Okay, so maybe they aren't the greatest generation by anyone's standard, but they are surely the best of the bottom third percentile of their own somewhat muddled and suspect generation.
Ben Fountain
#42. The Kessler Theater is one such gem, an Art Deco beauty ... for a slice of real life, there's always the Kessler.
Ben Fountain
#43. everybody around here's such a major conservative till they get sick, get screwed over by their insurance company, their job goes over to China or whatever, then they're like, 'Oooooh, what happened?
Ben Fountain
#44. 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.
Ben Fountain
#45. What might be merely embarrassing in real life is made obscene and hostile by TV.
Ben Fountain
#46. 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.
Ben Fountain
#47. There is a vast asymmetry in the dynamic here that Billy can't quite put his finger on, even though it's the elephant shitting all over the room.
Ben Fountain
#48. have you not had your morning glass of shut up?
Ben Fountain
#49. 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.
Ben Fountain
#50. 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.
Ben Fountain
#51. 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.
Ben Fountain
#52. America is one big maill with a country attached to it.
Ben Fountain
#53. Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.
Ben Fountain
#54. I realized I was never going to have any peace with myself unless I made an honest stab at trying to write.
Ben Fountain
#55. I think sometimes nothing is better than something. I mean, I'd rather have nothing than let this guy use me like his bitch.
Ben Fountain
#56. 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.
Ben Fountain
#57. 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.
Ben Fountain
#58. No country that lets its leaders lie like that deserves a single soldier to die for it." She
Ben Fountain
#59. Society may not need you, strictly speaking, but some sort of use can usually be found.
Ben Fountain
#60. The Revolution had reached that classic mature stage where it existed only for its own sake.
Ben Fountain
#61. Is this what they mean by courage? Simple doing all the things you were trained to do, albeit everything at once and very fast.
Ben Fountain
#62. 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.
Ben Fountain
#63. A person deprived of beauty and pleasure puts me in mind of the Haitian notion of a zombie - a person disconnected from his or her soul, a person who works for others' profit but never his own, a person who mindlessly does the bidding of the boss and exists in an emotional and mental limbo.
Ben Fountain
#64. 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.
Ben Fountain
#65. Let me just say, we call Iraq the abnormal normal, 'cause over there the weirdest stuff is just everyday life.
Ben Fountain
#66. 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.
Ben Fountain
#67. 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.
Ben Fountain
#68. What he'd like to say is that he's lived it, if not the entire breadth and depth of the Christian faith then certainly the central thrust of it. The mystery, the awe, that huge sadness and grief. Oh my people.
Ben Fountain
#69. Maybe we need a war now and then to get our priorities straight, a second man says.
Ben Fountain
#70. Fake it till you make it, he reminds himself. This is how he's survived Army life so far.
Ben Fountain
#71. 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.
Ben Fountain
#72. I like to kill my enemies and listen to the lamentations of their women
Ben Fountain
#73. Billy offers small hums of agreement and waits for the momma-logue to wind down.
Ben Fountain
#74. Eruptions of talent continue to happen in Haiti, in spite of everything.
Ben Fountain
#75. You make it happen by convincing everyone it's happening, belief in the first instance being a vaporous construct of duplicity, puff, evasion, cant, and bald-faced lies.
Ben Fountain
#76. 'Late bloomer' is another way of saying 'slow learner.'
Ben Fountain
#77. It's amazing what happens when you stick yourself in a place and let things take their more or less natural course.
Ben Fountain
#78. It's going to be a long, lonesome eleven months in Iraq, long and lonesome being the best-case scenario
Ben Fountain
#79. There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.
Ben Fountain
#80. 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.
Ben Fountain
#81. He could not comprehend what was happening to him, but it had to do with the casual cruelty of people who'd never missed a meal or had a gun stuck to their heads.
Ben Fountain
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