Mark Leyner Quotes

#1. I'm in that very preliminary stage of wondering how exactly to "pressurize" the novel in some way I've never considered before.

Mark Leyner

#2. But that's what nonfiction is, people. Shitty feelings and encounters with death.

Mark Leyner

#3. My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.

Mark Leyner

#4. When I started, I wanted to be thought of as tortured and seductive, not funny, but humor tends to be a reflexive part of a person's sensibility. It's an almost impossible thing to teach anyone, which leads me to believe that it's intuitive.

Mark Leyner

#5. People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

Mark Leyner

#6. I don't walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. It's worse than bleak, it's apocalyptic.

Mark Leyner

#7. My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.

Mark Leyner

#8. 'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life.

Mark Leyner

#9. I think people got in touch with me either knowing my work, or probably more frequently just knowing a plot or sort of buzz about something I did and sort of saying, "Get that guy that writes the crazy stuff in here."

Mark Leyner

#10. My idea with my work is always to fashion something that's impossible to transpose into any other media.

Mark Leyner

#11. Sometimes I think my purpose is as a saboteur when I'm working with other people, derailing what they're trying to do or taking things to a ludicrous extremity.

Mark Leyner

#12. I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.

Mark Leyner

#13. If I were asked to give a commencement speech (which I'll never be), I'd say basically: They're all gonna laugh at you. Life is pretty much like Carrie's prom. So ... stay secret.

Mark Leyner

#14. Are the Gods real or is Ike Karton just crazy? And the answer is: Yes.

Mark Leyner

#15. I guess I can picture things once they're done - I just can't picture actually doing them.

Mark Leyner

#16. You are fiercely heterosexual and well-formed, and it's no one's business that you've shrunk your parents and keep them in a terranium, but you have a gatling gun for a mouth, and if that's a diary you're producing from your cleavage, I'm leaving.

Mark Leyner

#17. As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world.

Mark Leyner

#18. I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

Mark Leyner

#19. I've always been entranced with theater.

Mark Leyner

#20. The interesting thing about something in the back of your mind is that it can travel pretty far back in your mind.

Mark Leyner

#21. Yo! You're my dope dealer not my thesis adviser. If I wanted your opinion about my dissertation, I'd have asked for it, Motherfucker!

Mark Leyner

#22. I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look.

Mark Leyner

#23. I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.

Mark Leyner

#24. I'm fascinated with video games, though I can't really play them. It's definitely an art form that intrigues me to no end, though.

Mark Leyner

#25. Even those who consider all this total bullshit have to concede that it's upscale, artisanal bullshit of the highest order.

Mark Leyner

#26. We have nothing in this life of suffocating obligation but our motherfucking impudence!

Mark Leyner

#27. It's in great joy that we grasp truth.

Mark Leyner

#28. I think to simply make fun of something isn't particularly interesting. I try to not just do a parody of something or belittle something or disparage something.

Mark Leyner

#29. Stand-up comedy had an interesting effect on me in terms of how I started to think about constructing things, because I really loved the interstices, the linkages, or lack thereof.

Mark Leyner

#30. I think I'm a shy, self-conscious person who thinks he's being looked at and tries to look okay. Not in a hottie, narcissistic way necessarily.

Mark Leyner

#31. Studies have failed to find any
substantial evidence proving a relationship between sugar consumption and hyperactivity.

Mark Leyner

#32. One of the things that struck me as unique about Hollywood is that I never had bad meetings. There were all enthusiastic, but meaninglessly enthusiastic.

Mark Leyner

#33. fate is the ultimate preexisting condition.

Mark Leyner

#34. Although we may deplore the film's scatological language, sexual explicitness and gratuitous gore as seemingly designed only to shock, in the manner of an angry, attention-craving child, we must remember that this movie was actually made by an angry, attention-craving child.

Mark Leyner

#35. I always thought of my work as being animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity.

Mark Leyner