Mark Leyner (born 1956) is an American postmodernist author.
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.
People have no idea how much work it is for a man to produce an ejaculation. You have this seminal vesicle churning out this fluid, the prostate gland producing an alkaline solution. It's like having five iron chefs in your crotch working to cook up this stuff.
I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.
My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.
When you are a child, you often stare too closely at the wrong thing. I remember the first time I was taken to Yankee Stadium. Someone had spilled something sweet earlier in the day and the ground was covered with ants. I spent the whole game staring at the ants, and that was more fascinating than the game.
My idea with my work is always to fashion something that's impossible to transpose into any other media.
It's in great joy that we grasp truth.
The interesting thing about something in the back of your mind is that it can travel pretty far back in your mind.
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!
I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look.
I have an enduring, very robust infatuation with dictators. I have an infatuation with Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini. In the Paris Review interview I did (in 2013), I said my next book, this one, was going to be about Mussolini. I wound up only having a Mussolini cameo in the book.
I'm in that very preliminary stage of wondering how exactly to "pressurize" the novel in some way I've never considered before.
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.
I always thought of my work as being animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity.
In me, speaking psychologically, there is always an ongoing struggle between my enormously self-regarding, almost delusionally aspirational, Napoleonic personality and a marginalized one.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
I dont walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. Its worse than bleak, its apocalyptic.