Gordon Lish Quotes

#1. Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.

Cynthia Ozick

#2. In Kamby Bolongo Mean River damage and delusion walk hand in hand, and everything we think we know is gradually called into question. Reading like a cross between Samuel Beckett's 'The Calmative' and Gordon Lish's Dear Mr. Capote, Robert Lopez's new novel gets under your skin and latches on.

Brian Evenson

#3. Never be sincere - sincerity is the death of writing.

Gordon Lish

#4. It's not what happens to people on the page; it's about what happens to a reader in his heart and mind.

Gordon Lish

#5. I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire.

Gordon Lish

#6. Often I have struggled for days to get the image of the photograph to overlap the spirit I see. It is an awesome responsibility, and a lonely one.

Ruth Bernhard

#7. In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

Charles Darwin

#8. People don't comprehend God with their head - they comprehend with their soul.

Sharon Dunn

#9. The secret of good writing is telling the truth.

Gordon Lish

#10. At the end of the Middle Ages, slavery was almost unknown in Christian Europe. During the early modern period, the rise of European capitalism went hand in hand with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade.

Yuval Noah Harari

#11. I have come to be convinced that it is only the unbending observance of custom that sustains life in an urban circumstance.

Gordon Lish

#12. I challenge you to make your life the masterpiece you want to paint, the novel you want to read, the day you want to wake to.

Toni Sorenson

#13. He can't let me die. He won't I am the little lightning girl, and I am going to make the world change.

Victoria Aveyard

#14. I'm not saying girls are perfect, because we all know that's not true. But why be unfaithful to her if she was true to you.

Tupac Shakur

#15. Everything you use in a modern life style has to be made using a tool of some sort.

Paul Harvey

#16. Writing is not about self-expression; it is about putting words on paper.

Gordon Lish

#17. Don't have stories; have sentences.

Gordon Lish