Quotes by Ben Fountain

About Ben Fountain:

Ben Fountain is an American fiction writer currently living in Dallas, Texas. He has won many awards including a PEN/Hemingway award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2007) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for his debut novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

America loves to pray, God knows. America prays and prays and prays, it is the land of unchained prayer, and all this ceremonial praying is hard on Billy.

Ben Fountain

At the door to the locker room Dime asks [Ennis] to autograph his ball. Ennis rears back. He's chuckling but his eyes are wary. 'Why you want that? I'm just an old equipment hand, nobody cares about my autograph.' 'As far as I'm concerned you run the...

Ben Fountain

Why?' He kept asking in his sweetly belling voice, its tone as pure as marbles swirled around a crystal pail. Why him wun up the tree? Why him nest up theah? Why him gadder nuts? Why? Why? Why? And Billy answering every question to the best of his ab...

Ben Fountain

What he'd like to say is that he's lived it, if not the entire breadth and depth of the Christian faith then certainly the central thrust of it. The mystery, the awe, that huge sadness and grief. Oh my people.

Ben Fountain

I like to kill my enemies and listen to the lamentations of their women

Ben Fountain

He decides he wants both more or less. He’d like to hang with Beyonce in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things together like playing board games and going out for ice cream, or how about this, a three-week trial run in some tro...

Ben Fountain

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

Ben Fountain

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 ...

Ben Fountain

Not that she means anything by it, he knows. This is simply her lifelong habit of moderation at work, her need to tamp everything down to the routine, the modest, the tepid everyday. He understands the whole concept of boundaries, but there’s a poi...

Ben Fountain

Where else but America could football flourish, America with its millions of fertile acres of corn, soy, and wheat, its lakes of dairy, its year-round gushers of fruits and vegetables, and such meats, that extraordinary pipline of beef, poultry, seaf...

Ben Fountain

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

Ben Fountain

It was the sixties, exactly, all we wanted to do was to smoke a lot of dope and ball a lot of chicks. Vietnam, excuse me? Why would I wanna go get my ass shot off in some stinking rice paddy just so Nixon can have his four more years? Screw that, and...

Ben Fountain

But I am scared. Everybody's scared." "You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you've done nobody's going to doubt you." Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a w...

Ben Fountain

[Norm said,] 'To all those who argue this war is a mistake, I'd like to point out that we've removed from power one of history's most ruthless and belligerent tyrants. A man who cold-bloodedly murdered thousands of his own people. Who built palaces f...

Ben Fountain

...he wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your ya...

Ben Fountain

As if sorrow is the true reality? Without ever putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory.

Ben Fountain

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.

Ben Fountain

No it was my choice. It's what I wanted to do. And I knew they'd probably send me to Iraq. It's not like anybody lied to me." She groans. "Billy, all these mofos ever do is lie. You think if they halfway told the truth we'd even be in a fucking war? ...

Ben Fountain

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 les...

Ben Fountain

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.

Ben Fountain

Author Bio

  • NameBen Fountain
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • Born1958
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • AwardsNational Book Critics Circle Award; Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award