Sam Lipsyte Quotes

#1. You could touch for a couple of bucks. The window of the booth went up and you stuck out the bills. They might tell you not to pinch, but I was a stroke type anyway. Some guys, I guess they want to leave a mark. Me, I just like the feel.

Sam Lipsyte

#2. I was glad I'd remembered to shucksify my vocabulary in the company of children.

Sam Lipsyte

#3. I'm finding that the older I get, it's not that I learn new things, it's more like I find out how much of what I know is common knowledge.

Sam Lipsyte

#4. Is this what Principal Fontana meant by the phrase 'well-rounded'?
It's fucking spherical, Catamounts.

Sam Lipsyte

#5. Yes, we could solve for why, but we could also eat another slice of coconut cake.

Sam Lipsyte

#6. Is it too soon to say I love you?"
"Yes. No."
"Soonish I will say that I love you."
"And in the meantime?"
"I will merely love you.

Sam Lipsyte

#7. I looked for Gary in all of the Gary places, but I was too early. These places were all haunted by the future of Gary.

Sam Lipsyte

#8. Our friendship, for example, and how quickly we passed through each other, from fascinated strangers to loyal chums to relics of each other's world. We'd been pawns of proximity, choiceless as brothers.

Sam Lipsyte

#9. You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man.

Sam Lipsyte

#10. They weren't like dolls, because dolls had no feelings. Kids had feelings, just not any remotely related to yours.

Sam Lipsyte

#11. You think everyone will stay behind and do everything you did all over again, forever. You picture old geezers in jean jackets doing whip-its behind the plaza.

Sam Lipsyte

#12. Of All the Gin Joints is one part cinematic history, one part old Hollywood weirdness, and one part handy basic bar guide, with a dash of romance and more than a few wry twists. Bailey and Hemingway prove themselves very entertaining cultural mixologists.

Sam Lipsyte

#13. Dept. of Speculation is gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways.

Sam Lipsyte

#14. When you work at home, fellow alums, discipline is the supreme virtue. Suicidal self-loathing lurks behind every coffee break. Activities must be expertly scheduled, from shopping to showers to panic attacks.

Sam Lipsyte

#15. Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show.

Sam Lipsyte

#16. They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene.

Sam Lipsyte

#17. I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

Sam Lipsyte

#18. We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons.

Sam Lipsyte

#19. Write what you know. Write what you don't know. But most of all, write what you'd rather not know.

Sam Lipsyte

#20. How much I'd always envied the tight life of voles. The hidey hole was happiness.

Sam Lipsyte

#21. The newspaper Hilda gets delivered would call me evil. The one I buy on the corner would say it's more complicated than that.

Sam Lipsyte

#22. We are both from the same kind of towns. We both know the sound of swivel-head spray at midnight on a summer lawn. We both know the weak secrets of us.

Sam Lipsyte

#23. His eyes had the ebb of his liver in them and he bore the air of a man who looks right at you and only sees the last of himself.

Sam Lipsyte

#24. I'd become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody's error in judgement.

Sam Lipsyte

#25. Atticus Lish is a true original and this is a tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one.

Sam Lipsyte

#26. I wanted to have friends from all over the world in the way of a man who has no friends.

Sam Lipsyte

#27. There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten's prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.

Sam Lipsyte

#28. I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.

Sam Lipsyte

#29. I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.

Sam Lipsyte

#30. If you flowed without incident or complaint through the global circuitry of want.

Sam Lipsyte

#31. Van Wort was fat and his name was Van Wort. With that combination, why would you pack your kid off to camp? Let him play with ladybugs in the safety of his own lawn.

Sam Lipsyte

#32. I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness came over me.

Sam Lipsyte

#33. She liked reality shows the best, and then the shows that purported to be about reality.

Sam Lipsyte

#34. Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez's powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.

Sam Lipsyte

#35. We are spawn of woodland apes. No code has been undone. Neither faith nor reason will deliver us. We must look to the trees.

Sam Lipsyte

#36. The bullshit never ends. That's the main thing to remember. It never ends.

Sam Lipsyte

#37. Shudder, in fact, is not quite the word for the feeling. Feeling is not quite the word for the feeling. How's bathing at knifepoint in the phlegm of the dead? Is that a feeling?

Sam Lipsyte

#38. You think you know yourself, the world. You believe you've got a bead on everybody else's bullshit, but what about your own?

Sam Lipsyte

#39. Stuff me in a tutu and let's screen experimental videos all day.

Sam Lipsyte

#40. The Brit's eyes had this pucker of awful witness.

Sam Lipsyte

#41. Lee was my father's lawyer, a mensch. But he's been very sick. Cancer. Pancreatic." "That's one of the worst. A killer." "Yes, the ones that kill you are definitely the worst. [ ... ]

Sam Lipsyte

#42. You can't go walking through Mordor in naught but your skin.

Sam Lipsyte

#43. This country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them.

Sam Lipsyte

#44. No emotion or insight is too small to inflict on the world. Let it all fly. Don't let it eat you from the inside.

Sam Lipsyte

#45. Everything's weird if you stare at it.

Sam Lipsyte

#46. It was early, late, lockjaw hour.

Sam Lipsyte

#47. Why do you think posers pose? Because they want to be invited to the dominion of the real. And they know their very desire for it disqualifies them.

Sam Lipsyte

#48. It's hard to fuck your girlfriend when she's fucked up and you're not. It's harder than the skee-ball they used to have at the Plaza arcade, all that agony over a fuzzy piece.

Sam Lipsyte

#49. People gave names to things so they could tell stories about them, goddam fairy tales about children who got out alive.

Sam Lipsyte