Mark Leyner quotes:

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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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!"

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

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

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

  • 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."

  • I've always been entranced with theater.

  • 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.

  • 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!

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

  • Do it, my fellow Americans! Do it for every adolescent anomic skank genius cloistered in his room, getting cranked, rabidly humping his sampler as he confects some heretical, monstrous persona for himself and dreams of an orgiastic, blood-soaked apocalypse. Yes, the /impudence!/ We have /nothing/ in this life of suffocating obligation but our own motherfucking impudence! For God's sake, give us this day our motherfucking big-dick impudence!!

  • I dont walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. Its worse than bleak, its apocalyptic.

  • 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.

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

  • I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.

  • 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.

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

  • It's in great joy that we grasp truth.

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

  • 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.

  • So where does the name Adam's apple come from? Most people say that it is from the notion that this bump was caused by the forbidden fruit getting stuck in the throat of Adam in the Garden of Eden. There is a problem with this theory because some Hebrew scholars believe that the forbidden fruit was the pomegranate. The Koran claims that the forbidden fruit was a banana. So take your pick---Adam's apple, Adam's pomegranate, Adam's banana. Eve clearly chewed before swallowing.

  • 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.

  • I've always wanted to be a poet at the beginning. I would look at my grandparents' books and my parents' books. And in my family, a typical aspirational Jewish family, being a writer was very much exalted, and it seemed impossible to me, that I could ever do something like that.

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