Gary Lutz Quotes

#1. It was my mother who taught me the one worthwhile thing: when they ask if you like what you see in the mirror, pretend that what they mean is what's behind you
the shower curtain, the tile, the wallpaper, whatever's there.

Gary Lutz

#2. Here is a story in the worst way. I have no business being anywhere in it. It comes between me and the life I have coming.

Gary Lutz

#3. They weren't hours, these classes; they weren't even forty-five minutes
they were "periods," which sounded to me as if they were each at once a little era and then the end you had to see decisively put to it.

Gary Lutz

#4. You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.

Gary Lutz

#5. What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life?

Gary Lutz

#6. Because some days the world holds true at the drop of a hat, don't you find? Things favor themselves: whatever you reach for - a shimmered arm, or parts unknown - is ready, finally, to have itself be handled.

Gary Lutz

#7. A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same.

Gary Lutz

#8. The job required the luxurious useless indoor fortitude it has always been my fortune to enjoy.

Gary Lutz

#9. My writing isn't a career or a craft or a hobby or anything like that. It is more like a tiny annex to my life, a little crawl space in which I occasionally end up by accident in the dark.

Gary Lutz

#10. Over and over, all I had done was say, 'There, I've said it,' though it would leave me feeling only exposed, not unmasked.

Gary Lutz

#11. Dylan Nice's Other Kinds is the most extraordinary short-story-col lection debut I have read in years.
It is a book to be memorized.

Gary Lutz

#12. I was a great many far cries from myself.

Gary Lutz

#13. Desks are terrible places, no matter how many wheels a chair might have. You can't do much about how drawers fill up.

Gary Lutz

#14. I had to piece together a diet for her, too. I knew which combinations of which foods on which days would rehang everything that was draped so delicately beneath her skin. In a matter of months, the body under the smock was organized anew, redistributed

Gary Lutz

#15. Then came nights when, lying awake beside my final wife, I would spend too much time putting my finger on what was wrong. I was wearing the finger out.
What was wrong was very simple.
Sometimes her life and mine fell on the same day.

Gary Lutz

#16. Mike Topp is a disablingly funny writer
a miniaturist of nervous precisions, our supreme abridger of metropolitan startlement and inner fidgetry. He dazes and graces us.

Gary Lutz

#17. I've been within an inch of my life.

Gary Lutz

#18. If I have a problem, it is this: there is a store where everything costs a dollar.

Gary Lutz

#19. Kim Chinquee writes with remarkable heart and grace. Her wise capsulizings of love's devastations and of life's roil and disappointments come at you with a sorrowing precision that comforts even as it haunts.

Gary Lutz

#20. From time to time I show up in myself just long enough for people to know they are not in the room alone.

Gary Lutz

#21. I don't know which is finally sicker
specifics or engulfing abstractions.

Gary Lutz