Ben Fountain
Ben Fountain
Ben Fountainis an American fiction writer currently living in Dallas, Texas. He has won many awards including a PEN/Hemingway award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Storiesand the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for his debut novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
technology reality hands
You have the mainstream bourgeois life of the U.S., Europe, the "developed" world - the life of technology, education, mortgages, careers, a certain level of physical comfort - while on the other hand, several billion people on the planet exist on less than a dollar a day. That's a huge and terrible reality to get your head around.
emotional boss soul
A person deprived of beauty and pleasure puts me in mind of the Haitian notion of a zombie - a person disconnected from his or her soul, a person who works for others' profit but never his own, a person who mindlessly does the bidding of the boss and exists in an emotional and mental limbo.
writing law mba
I really had to decide why I was writing. I had no interest in going back to law; I very briefly - for about six hours - considered going to get my MBA, but in the end, I realized that the only work I really wanted to do was write.
eye writing world
By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.
years eight effort
I started publishing stories in small magazines early on, but after seven or eight or nine years you feel like you need a little more than that to show for your efforts.
book writing years
I thought when I started writing that I'd have a book out in four or five years, and as it became apparent that that wasn't going to happen, I became increasingly frustrated and unsure of myself.
writing cutting thinking
I'm a writer, not an editor, and though the editing rarely cut into my writing time, it did take away from that walking-around-thinking-about-it-when-you're-not-thinking-about-it time that I think is important for writers. When you're half-thinking about what you're working on while driving, cooking . . . just letting things sift and settle, come to you.
book writing years
I quit law in 1988 to start writing, and it took me 17 years from that point to get a book contract. I guess you can say I was on the slow train.
writing trying honest
I realized I was never going to have any peace with myself unless I made an honest stab at trying to write.
writing decision want
If you want to write, then write; if you don't want to write, then don't write. I fell into the former category, and I just made the decision that I'd keep on because I liked it and might someday do something decent.
letting-go writing funny-things
The funny thing is, about the time I let go of any aspiration toward worldly success, that's about the time I started writing decent work.
writing years stories
It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me - that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.
sticks natural courses
It's amazing what happens when you stick yourself in a place and let things take their more or less natural course.
writing school law
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.