Mark Leyner famous quotes

03-28-2025

You are fiercely heterosexual and well-formed, and it's no one's business that you've shrunk your parents and keep them in a terranium, but you have a gatling gun for a mouth, and if that's a diary you're producing from your cleavage, I'm leaving.
-- Mark Leyner

#Gun #Parent #Leaving
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

#Thinking #People #Trying
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

#Believe #Writing #Thinking
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

#Husband #Father #Son
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.
-- Mark Leyner

#Fun #Thinking #Interesting
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

#Reading #Writing #Absolute Certainty
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

#Style #Trying #World
The interesting thing about something in the back of your mind is that it can travel pretty far back in your mind.
-- Mark Leyner

#Interesting #Mind #Interesting Things
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

#Trying #Delight #Reader
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

#Adults #Kind #Anarchist
I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look.
-- Mark Leyner

#Yards #Looks
I always thought of my work as being animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity.
-- Mark Leyner

#Generosity #Spirit #Animated
I guess I can picture things once they're done - I just can't picture actually doing them.
-- Mark Leyner

#Done
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

#Believe #Garden #Names
I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.
-- Mark Leyner

#Dots #Hot #Dense
I dont walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. Its worse than bleak, its apocalyptic.
-- Mark Leyner

#Outlook #Apocalyptic #Walks
Yo! Youâ€™re my dope dealer not my thesis adviser. If I wanted your opinion about my dissertation, Iâ€™d have asked for it, Motherfucker!
-- Mark Leyner

#Dope #Opinion #Wanted
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

#Believe #Seductive #Impossible

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