Top 35 Ben Fountain Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Ben Fountain

3. “How does anyone ever know anything – the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation.”

— Ben Fountain

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

— Ben Fountain

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

— Ben Fountain

6. “Maybe the light’s at the other end of the tunnel.”

— Ben Fountain

7. “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

8. “But a lot of the time that’s how it works, life gets so dark until we think all the light’s gone out of us. But it’s there, it’s always there. If we just open the door a crack the light comes pouring in.”

— Ben Fountain

9. “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.”

— Ben Fountain

10. “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.”

— Ben Fountain

11. “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.”

— Ben Fountain

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

— Ben Fountain

13. “Is this what they mean by courage? Simple doing all the things you were trained to do, albeit everything at once and very fast.”

— Ben Fountain

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

— Ben Fountain

15. “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

16. “Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration – poetry, novels, music, dancing – if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.”

— Ben Fountain

17. “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.”

— Ben Fountain

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

— Ben Fountain

19. “Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die.”

— Ben Fountain

20. “I quit law in 1988 to start writing, and it took me 17 years from that point to get a book contract. I guess you can say I was on the slow train.”

— Ben Fountain

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

— Ben Fountain

22. “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.”

— Ben Fountain

23. “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.”

— Ben Fountain

24. “I realized I was never going to have any peace with myself unless I made an honest stab at trying to write.”

— Ben Fountain

25. “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.”

— Ben Fountain

26. “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.”

— Ben Fountain

27. “Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.”

— Ben Fountain

28. “They were all lawyers, all schooled in the authority of words, though as their words turned to dust a pall of impotence and futility settled over the mission.”

— Ben Fountain

29. “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.”

— Ben Fountain

30. “I thought when I started writing that I’d have a book out in four or five years, and as it became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen, I became increasingly frustrated and unsure of myself.”

— Ben Fountain

31. “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.”

— Ben Fountain

32. “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.”

— Ben Fountain

33. “From about the age of 15 or 16 I’d had the notion that I wanted to write fiction, and I’d done enough in college to satisfy myself that I had a knack for it – I wouldn’t call it “talent” – though I wondered if I’d ever have the guts to actually commit to it.”

— Ben Fountain

34. “I never listen to music when I’m writing.”

— Ben Fountain

35. “Society may not need you, strictly speaking, but some sort of use can usually be found.”

— Ben Fountain