Top 64 Quotes & Sayings by Ben Fountain

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.

My first visit to Haiti was in May 1991, four months into the initial term of Haiti's first democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. At the time, it seemed that Haiti was on the cusp of a new era.

I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.

I never listen to music when I'm writing.

If you're looking for the phony in American politics, you could do worse than follow the money.

People rarely grow in humility once they reach the White House.

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.

Even a cursory run through American history shows exceptionalism has been used to justify bloodshed, oppression, and profit.

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

Obama was elected on the shoulders of an incipient movement that he allowed to languish once he became president.

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.

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.

American history is not clean.

The American identity is mind-bogglingly various.

Democracy's premise rests on the notion that the collective wisdom of the majority will prove right more often than it's wrong; that given sufficient opportunity in the pursuit of happiness, your population will develop its talents, its intellect, its better judgment; that over time its capacity for discernment and self-correction will be enlarged.

The collective memory of America is short.

Americans care a lot about authenticity, rightly so. Every election is a quest for the genuine article. This is precisely what makes the long con of American politics such a rich and mystifying study.

After Bush was elected in 2004 - please note that I didn't say 're-elected' - and I was walking around in my befuzzed state of confusion and low-grade depression, I set out more or systematically to read writers who'd grappled with that fundamental question of what America is, why it is the way it is.

I think if you spend much time dwelling on influence you can get self-conscious about every line you write. That's a great way to freeze up.

Surely it's no coincidence that the Era of the AUMF, the Era of Endless War, is also the Golden Era of the Chickenhawk. We keep electing leaders who, on the most basic experiential level, literally have no idea what they're doing.

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

Nobody ever came to America with a starry-eyed dream of working for starvation wages.

The national framework of social insurance - social security, unemployment and disability benefits, work programs, and workers' compensation - protected citizens from the kinds of risks that private markets couldn't or wouldn't insure.

Let the record reflect: the American people are a bunch of suckers.

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

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

Political rights notwithstanding, 'freedom' rings awfully hollow when you're getting nickel-and-dimed to death in your everyday life.

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

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.

From the start, Trump's rallies had the air of the tent revival, that same hot thrum of militant exorcism and ecstasy.

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.

In the arsenal of the phony, the politics of God is one of the deadliest punches to the sweet spot of the American mind.

It is sort of weird being honored for the worst day of your life.

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

I kept going back while I was writing the novel - which never sold, may it rest in peace - and by the time it was finished I had too many connections to Haiti to walk away.

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.

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.

If you could figure out how to live with family then you'd gone a long way toward finding your peace.

I got brilliant stories from people who'd never set foot in an MFA program and had published very little, and terrible stories from people who'd published a lot and had all the credentials. It was all over the map and that was part of the fun.

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.

It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me - that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

If a person wants to be of any use to himself, he better insist on getting his fair share of beauty and pleasure, and if there's something about the system that's keeping him from getting his share, then I think he's well within his rights to fight to change that.

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.

The Kessler Theater is one such gem, an Art Deco beauty … for a slice of real life, there’s always the Kessler.

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.

Eruptions of talent continue to happen in Haiti, in spite of everything.

The strange, wonderful stories of Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain introduce us to the tremendously gifted Kirsten Menger-Anderson, a writer whose subject is nothing less than the diagnosis and cure of the human malady. We follow twelve generations of New York City's Steenwycks family through their forays into phrenology, mesmerism, radium therapy and similar misadventures, a historically rich narrative that Menger-Anderson delivers in striking, elegant prose and with a sure eye for detail. This is a remarkable debut by a writer to watch.

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.

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

Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

It's amazing what happens when you stick yourself in a place and let things take their more or less natural course.

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.

Maybe the light's at the other end of the tunnel.