Mark Leyner Quotes

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!! ~ Mark Leyner

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fantastic. It's volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I've read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It's been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me. ~ Douglas Coupland

I've always been entranced with theater. ~ Mark Leyner

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

He [Wallace] sent a quick note to his friend [Franzen] explaining his behavior. "the bold fact is that I'm a little afraid of you right now,"[ ... ] "all I can tell you is that I may have been that [a worthy opponent] for you a couple/ three years ago, and maybe 16 months or tow or 5 or 10 years hence, but right now I am a pathetic and very confused man, a failed writer at 28, who is so jealous, so sickly searing envious of you and Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David Fuckward Leavitt and any young man who is right now producing pages with which he can live and even approving them off some base-clause of conviction about the entrprise's meaning and end that I consider suicide a reasonable- if not at this point a desirable- option with respect to the whole wretched problem. ~ D.T. Max

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. ~ Mark Leyner

Bro, we're living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology, a petite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiquitously permeates the world
high culture, low culture, bienpensant media, prestige literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reasonable response to this situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward everything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all groveling intellectuals. That said, I think it's important to maintain a cheery disposition. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. I've memorized this line from Andre Breton's magnificent homage to Antonin Artaud
"I salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." Given the state of things, that's what we need to be doing, all the time
negating everything that causes us to be dead while alive. ~ Mark Leyner

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. ~ Mark Leyner

We're all adults here - we all know the score. We know what they do to people like me and my mom, to paradoxical hybrids of arrogant narcissism and vulnerable naïveté. We know what happens to unreconstructed surrealist militants. Tortured. Marked for assassination. Imagine what awaits me out there. ~ Mark Leyner

Someone can intentionally fake blindness for some secondary gain (malingering)
a prisoner who says he can't see in order to try to avoid going directly to jail. It is not difficult to figure out when patients say they are blind but can actually see. We have a simple test that lets us determine whether the eyes are functioning. Using a rotating striped drum, we test for something called optokinetic nystagmus. as the drum spins, normal eyes will be seen moving back and forth.
If a striped rotating drum is not available, you can always use a picture of J. Lo's rear. Move it back and forth, and any normal eyes will follow. ~ Mark Leyner

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. ~ Mark Leyner

I was an infinitely hot and dense dot. ~ Mark Leyner

'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. ~ Mark Leyner

And she told me I deserved a merit badge for it ... which was such a particularly funny, particularly uncanny thing for her to have said, because when I was about eight years old and I was a Cub Scout, all the boys in our den were sitting around in the kitchen of our den mother one afternoon, and she lit a cigarette bending over the flame from the front burner of the stove, and she set her hair on fire, and I put it out - I don't remember if I just smothered it with my hands or doused it with some Sprite or what - but she stared at me with this sort of demented look of gratitude on her face (she drank) and she said, 'I'm going to recommend that you get a merit badge for this,' and sure enough I did, I actually got a merit badge for extinguishing the fire in our den mother's hair. ~ Mark Leyner

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. ~ Mark Leyner

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. ~ Mark Leyner

Studies have failed to find any
substantial evidence proving a relationship between sugar consumption and hyperactivity. ~ Mark Leyner

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." ~ Mark Leyner

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. ~ Mark Leyner

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! ~ Mark Leyner

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

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. ~ Mark Leyner

fate is the ultimate preexisting condition. ~ Mark Leyner

And I still believe that there are two basic kinds of people--people who cultivate the narcissistic delusion of being watched at all times through the viewfinder of a camera, and people who cultivate the paranoid delusion of being watched at all times through the high-powered optics of a sniper's rifle, and I think I fall--and have always fallen--into this latter category. ~ Mark Leyner

We have nothing in this life of suffocating obligation but our motherfucking impudence! ~ Mark Leyner

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. ~ Mark Leyner

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. ~ Mark Leyner

I remember how people used to bitch about those crazy tapes of the Beatles at Shea Stadium, about how you couldn't hear the music, that all you could hear was the screaming, the screaming of all those thousands of girls. But I've always loved that din especially - that vast, unrelenting din of screaming girls that almost completely overwhelms the sad, beautiful voices of John and Paul. That's great. That whole thing for me is the real music. ~ Mark Leyner

Are the Gods real or is Ike Karton just crazy? And the answer is: Yes. ~ Mark Leyner

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

Even those who consider all this total bullshit have to concede that it's upscale, artisanal bullshit of the highest order. ~ Mark Leyner

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. ~ Mark Leyner

Arts are what free and thriving people do with their time after their critical needs have been met. ~ Mark Noble

But to a higher mark than song can reach,
Rose this pure eloquence. ~ William Wordsworth

People think SEALs are fearless. Think again. No one lives without fear; ~ Mark Owen

Well, what was I to do? For the well-bred gentleman there was clearly only one recourse. I fucked him. ~ Mark Gatiss

A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else. ~ Mark Forsyth

People think what you are doing is real, on a TV show. ~ Mark Harmon

I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway. ~ Mark Twain

A friend is someone who stays in when the rest of the world has gone out. ~ Mark Twain

Free trade creates jobs and prosperity in the Netherlands at the port of Rotterdam or the airport at Schiphol. ~ Mark Rutte

Idle time is the devil's play. ~ Mark Dayton

When the Earth was last four degrees warmer, there was no ice at either pole. Global warming of this magnitude would eventually leave the whole planet without ice for the first time in nearly 40 million years. ~ Mark Lynas

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before. ~ Mark Twain

LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right. ~ Mark Steyn

This fear is what is the ruin of us all. And some dominate us; they take advantage of our fear and frighten us still more. Mark this: as long as people are afraid, they will rot like the birches in the marsh. We must grow bold; it is time! ~ Maxim Gorky

I think labels for the most part want to sign new discoveries so that that label alone is seen to be responsible for the rise of the artist. Not many labels want bands who have already made their mark, because their success is usually attributed to some other label somewhere else at another time. ~ Steven Morrissey

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

The true mark of greatness is not stridency but magnanimity. ~ J. William Fulbright

Life has no remote ... get up and change it yourself! ~ Mark A. Cooper

Two times two is twenty-two, four times four is forty-four. When numbers get serious, they leave a mark on your door. ~ Paul Simon

Because when you give too many fucks - when you give a fuck about everyone and everything - you will feel that you're perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to be just exactly the fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness. And it will eat you alive. You will see every adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal. ~ Mark Manson

Marriage isn't about Winning - It's about Lasting ~ Mark Gorman

I feel that it is no less interesting to be a trainer than to play oneself. I even take greater delight in the tournament successes of my lads than I do in my own. ~ Mark Dvoretsky

Taken from the musical play, "Scallawalli and Petwah" by Mark DiBernardo

"I saw Satan fall like lightening from heaven. ~ Mark DiBernardo

I hate puns. And, I'm tired of pardoning them. ~ Mark Lowry

If I feel sure of one thing, it is that this kind of "health" imperative is not moral. It is grooming. ~ Mark Greif

There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency - and a virtue, and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency - and a vice. ~ Mark Twain

Not every movement is progress; Some movements are just a way of burning fats! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Character roles only indicate that they're very different from who you are as a person, and for me, it's fun hiding behind characters that are so unlike who I am. ~ Mark Hamill

Sin makes you stupid. ~ Mark P. Shea

He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right."
"Who is Mark?"
"A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer."
Gregory says, "Did you not know? ~ Hilary Mantel

The tough thing about these senatorial jobs is you get 'yes' or 'no' votes. Your whole job is to either say 'yes' or 'no' and explain why. ~ Mark Kirk

Use the right word, not its second cousin. ~ Mark Twain

We "talk" relationship but we "live" religion, with unsatisfying results. Christianity defines itself, first and foremost, as a relationship with God. Even though this is true, our human nature tends toward living a relationship with God as if it were a religion ~ Mark Cowper-Smith

We must conserve our environment and pass it on to our children in as good or better condition than it was passed to us. ~ Mark Kennedy

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning. ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Giving is God's way. It is the way that I now understand is the truth of the Universe. Giving multiplies me and makes me feel complete and fulfilled. Giving makes me feel that I make a real and important difference. ~ Mark Victor Hansen

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be. ~ Mark Strand

We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain. ~ Mark Tobey