Ben Marcus quotes:

My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.

In certain strains of Judaism, there's a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, our tiny minds can't possibly comprehend Him. If we find ourselves comprehending Him, then we can be sure we're off track.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren't.

I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work - the pursuit of darkness, the negative - and I think in some sense I've internalised that as what one is supposed to do.

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.

The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can't just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.

It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours.

I'm interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or 'explains,' the larger mysteries of religion.

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

Thomas's mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that.

Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need.

Mostly we're motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there's a bit of a lab for bad behavior. You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.

Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.

Being with him was like being alone underwater - everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.

Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

I work, and then I leave the office, and I'm with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don't feel like I'm exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.

I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.

It was hard not to realize what kind of kid his parents wished they'd had, and when he thought about that kind of kid it was tempting for Paul to want to track, hunt, and eat the little thing.

Perhaps they didn't know they were at sea. Was there a certain percentage of people at sea who lacked the knowledge that they were at sea?

It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.

Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.

Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I'd said that, how many times I'd meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry.

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots. At the time of this writing, the whole world is a crime scene: People eat space with their bodies; they are rain decayers; the wind is slaughtered when they move. A retaliation is probably coming. Should a person cease to move, she would cease to kill the sky, and the world might begin to recover.

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

Slamming the book shut produces a wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.

Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.

My goal, with whatever I'm working on, is to lose track of time.

Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them.