Quotes from Ben Fountain

No country that lets its leaders lie like that deserves a single soldier to die for it." She

Everyone worries, everyone feels at least a little bit doomed basically all the time, even the richest, most successful, most secure among us live in perpetually anxious states of barely hanging on

You've been lucky so far, right? […] So keep on being lucky.

So much of life consists of inertia and drift, the brief savory or sour of any particular day tends to blur into the next so that it all becomes one big flavorless wad.

Bravo can laugh and feel somewhat superior because they know they're being used. Of course they do, manipulation is their air and element, for what is a soldier's job but to be the pawn of higher?

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and as every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow.

He can feel it rising in him, this powerful if not quite choate sense of how to live a strong and decent life.

It has been a frustrating game thus far and [the natives] blow off steam by spending money. Happily there is retail at every turn so the crow doesn't lack for buying opportunities, and it's the same everywhere Bravo has been, the airports, the hotels, the arenas and convention centers, in the downtowns and the suburbs alike, retail dominates the land. Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.

'Late bloomer' is another way of saying 'slow learner.'

Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

We, America, elected Trump. Putin didn't do it, nor the trolls in St. Petersburg with their zillions of busy bots. They may well have plucked certain strings in the national psyche - played us like a dimestore ukulele - but we were keen to be plucked.

In true demagogic fashion, Trump bypassed the head and spoke directly to the gut, to the biles and bubbling acids of raw emotion.

Pretty much any day is a good day to go to the ballpark, but that first day of the season is special. It's spring. The grass is green. Pessimism is impossible - at least, until the other team scores.

If you want to see a bunch of happy Americans, go out to opening day at any baseball stadium in the land.

The New Deal saved capitalism - saved it from the big-time capitalists - though many of the big-timers didn't see it that way.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

Upward mobility across classes peaked in the U.S. in the late 19th century. Most of the gains of the 20th century were achieved en masse; it wasn't so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people rising from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all classes. You didn't have to be exceptional to rise.

Learning essential stuff is as much a discipline as going to the gym or sticking to a diet, and an excellent antidote for the modern condition of being numb and dumb.

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.

I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say that I've read very little of David Foster Wallace's work. It's a huge gap in my education, one of many.

The American identity is mind-bogglingly various.

The Gilded Age robber barons - the Goulds, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and Rockefellers - did quite well under laissez-faire. Most of the rest of Americans were still stuck in the ditch, with little to no economic security, life expectancy of roughly 45 years, and horrific infant mortality rates that claimed 300 babies per 1,000 in the cities.

By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.