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
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.
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.
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.
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.
christian successful unique
Haiti is unique - the first successful slave revolt in history, the first black republic etc., and then when you get into the culture, the voodoo, and that wonderful synchretization of Christian and African belief and symbology, it's like nothing the world has ever seen.
country america way
Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.
perfection world moments
There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.
struggle thinking things-in-life
You'd think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing.
haiti eruption talent
Eruptions of talent continue to happen in Haiti, in spite of everything.
writing self risk
I have a horror of being self-indulgent and wasting time, and there is that risk in doing this kind of work. Are you totally deluded in sitting down at a desk every day and trying to write something? Is it self-indulgent, or might it possibly lead to something worthwhile? At a certain point I decided to keep on because I felt like the work was getting better, and I was taking great pleasure in that.