Words matter. These are the best Ben Fountain Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Americans care a lot about authenticity, rightly so. Every election is a quest for the genuine article. This is precisely what makes the long con of American politics such a rich and mystifying study.
Nobody ever came to America with a starry-eyed dream of working for starvation wages.
Obama was elected on the shoulders of an incipient movement that he allowed to languish once he became president.
Let the record reflect: the American people are a bunch of suckers.
People rarely grow in humility once they reach the White House.
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.
The American identity is mind-bogglingly various.
The collective memory of America is short.
The national framework of social insurance – social security, unemployment and disability benefits, work programs, and workers’ compensation – protected citizens from the kinds of risks that private markets couldn’t or wouldn’t insure.
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.
Pretty much any day is a good day to go to the ballpark, but that first day of the season is special. It’s spring. The grass is green. Pessimism is impossible – at least, until the other team scores.
Learning essential stuff is as much a discipline as going to the gym or sticking to a diet, and an excellent antidote for the modern condition of being numb and dumb.
Surely it’s no coincidence that the Era of the AUMF, the Era of Endless War, is also the Golden Era of the Chickenhawk. We keep electing leaders who, on the most basic experiential level, literally have no idea what they’re doing.
After Bush was elected in 2004 – please note that I didn’t say ‘re-elected’ – and I was walking around in my befuzzed state of confusion and low-grade depression, I set out more or systematically to read writers who’d grappled with that fundamental question of what America is, why it is the way it is.
From the start, Trump’s rallies had the air of the tent revival, that same hot thrum of militant exorcism and ecstasy.
‘Late bloomer’ is another way of saying ‘slow learner.’
I never listen to music when I’m writing.
I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time – the American South in the 1960s and ’70s – when the machine hadn’t completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines – TV, telephone, cars – were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.
In true demagogic fashion, Trump bypassed the head and spoke directly to the gut, to the biles and bubbling acids of raw emotion.
We, America, elected Trump. Putin didn’t do it, nor the trolls in St. Petersburg with their zillions of busy bots. They may well have plucked certain strings in the national psyche – played us like a dimestore ukulele – but we were keen to be plucked.
If you want to see a bunch of happy Americans, go out to opening day at any baseball stadium in the land.
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.
If you’re looking for the phony in American politics, you could do worse than follow the money.
Political rights notwithstanding, ‘freedom’ rings awfully hollow when you’re getting nickel-and-dimed to death in your everyday life.
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.