65 Quotes by Mark Leyner

  • Author Mark Leyner
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    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.

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  • Author Mark Leyner
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    I guess I can picture things once they’re done – I just can’t picture actually doing them.

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  • Author Mark Leyner
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    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.

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

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  • Author Mark Leyner
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    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.

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  • Author Mark Leyner
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    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.”

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  • Author Mark Leyner
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    There is something unspeakably consoling in one’s own smile. In that reflection, you can discern the face of yourself as a child and the face of yourself as a corpse. And in this moment, all the fundamental antinomies are reconciled – the sacred and the profane, the analyst and the analysand, the celebrated success and the abject failure. The pilot and the passenger. Writer and reader. Fiction and nonfiction. Past and present. And the mind that abides and the mind that is gone.

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  • Author Mark Leyner
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    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.

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