Mark Leyner Quotes & Sayings

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

He got a booklet out of a folder. 'This is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It's a standardized psychometric test we use to assess and analyze an individual's personality dynamic. It's got about six hundred true-or-false questions. You fill this out and then the computer will generate a report.' Well, I thought this was absolutely perfect! I was just delighted with the idea that psychodiagnostic algorithms would generate a posthumanist psychiatric profile for me for the autobiography. And both the Imaginary Intern and I felt this would really streamline the process, that it would save us a tremendous amount of work, and obviate the need for all that cloying introspection and redemptive candor that we both found so nauseating and counterrevolutionary. — Mark Leyner

I'm in that very preliminary stage of wondering how exactly to "pressurize" the novel in some way I've never considered before. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

It's the same thing that makes all pop music so heartbreaking. Even when Miley Cyrus sings "So I put my hands up, they're playin' my song / The butterflies fly away / I'm noddin' my head like 'Yeah!' / Movin' my hips like 'Yeah!'" in her song "Party in the U.S.A." It's that chirping mirth against a backdrop of despair, that juxtaposition of blithe optimism against all the crushing brutalities and inadequacies of life. The image of an ineffably beautiful butterfly flitting by the shattered windows of a dilapidated, abandoned factory is not so poignant because it highlights the indomitable life force. To the contrary, the butterfly (and the pop song) is like a PowerPoint cursor; it's there to whet our perception of and strengthen our affinity for what's moribund, for what's always dying before our eyes. Loving the moribund is our way of signaling the dead from this shore: "We are your kinsmen ... — 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

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

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

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

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

'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

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

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

But that's what nonfiction is, people. Shitty feelings and encounters with death. — Mark Leyner

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

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

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

I always thought of my work as being animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity. — 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 can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look. — Mark Leyner

I think I'm a shy, self-conscious person who thinks he's being looked at and tries to look okay. Not in a hottie, narcissistic way necessarily. — Mark Leyner

I don't walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. It's worse than bleak, it's apocalyptic. — Mark Leyner

On our last mission - our "final exam" - we were airlifted to a remote region, and we parachuted directly into a hostile enclave. We had to subdue the enemy using hand-to-hand tactics like tae kwon do and pugil sticks, cut their hair in styles appropriate to their particular face shapes, and give them perms. — Mark Leyner

fate is the ultimate preexisting condition. — 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

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

It's in great joy that we grasp truth. — Mark Leyner

My idea with my work is always to fashion something that's impossible to transpose into any other media. — Mark Leyner

I guess I can picture things once they're done - I just can't picture actually doing them. — Mark Leyner

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

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

I've always been entranced with theater. — 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

If I were asked to give a commencement speech (which I'll never be), I'd say basically: They're all gonna laugh at you. Life is pretty much like Carrie's prom. So ... stay secret. — Mark Leyner

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness." — 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