Sam Lipsyte Quotes

Yes," said Cooley. "That is the question, as the Bard might say." "The Bard?" "What's so funny?" said Cooley. "Nothing, sir," I said. "I just didn't know people still used that term." "Well, I'm a people, Burke. Am I not?" "Of course." "If you prick me, do I not bleed, you scat-gobbling, mother-rimming prick?" Occasionally Dean Cooley reverted to a vocabulary more suited to his marine years, but some maintained it was only when he felt threatened, or stretched for time. "Yes, sir," I said.

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

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

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.

We'd been walking in endless rectangles and now we were near the candy store again. The lights were out, the security gate down. We leaned up against the wall of a bank and I could feel the cool stone on my back, the billions of dollars thrumming through wires beneath and behind me, or on the night waves above. I wasn't quite sure how they traveled. Or how much they got out anymore.

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.

One of my big revelations was that nobody cares whether you write your novel or not. They want you to be happy. Your parents want you to have health insurance. Your friends want you to be a good friend. But everyone's thinking about their own problems and nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, 'Boy, I sure hope Sam finishes that chapter and gets one step closer to his dream of being a working writer.' Nobody does that. If you want to write, it has to come from you. If you don't want to write, that's great. Go do something else. That was a very liberating moment for me.

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

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.

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

You're growing up. All you need to remember is that nothing changes. New technology, new markets, global interconnectivity, doesn't matter. It's still the rulers and the ruled. The fleecers and the fleeced." "Which are you?" "I'm a piece of expensive equipment. You, too. Maybe not so expensive. [ ... ]

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The Rough Beast snorted. "You don't get it at all, buddy. It's not about wrestling. It's about stories. We're storytellers."
Caperton studied him. "Somebody at my job just said that."
"It's true! You have to be able to tell the story to get people on board for anything. A soft drink, a suck sesh, elective surgery, gardening, even your thing
public space? I prefer private space, but that's cool. Anyway, nobody cares about anything if there isn't a story attached. Ask the team that wrote the Bible. Ask Vincent Allan Poe."
"But doesn't it seem kind of creepy?" Caperton said. "All of us just going around calling ourselves storytellers?"
The Rough Beast shrugged. "Well, you can be negative. That's the easy way out.

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.

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

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

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

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. [ ... ]

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.

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.

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.

Who exactly are we?' I asked.
The American Dreamers. There aren't too many of us left.'
I don't know if I qualify.'
You an American? Or want to be an American?'
I am an American.'
You said you were having a dream.'
It's true, I did.'
Was it the one where you're inside the girl and you are pumping her and pumping her and you are so happy but then it turns out it's not a girl, it's really one of those super poisonous box jellyfish, and it stings you and you are screaming and screaming and the sky rains the diarrhea of babies?'
The ... no, I don't think so.'
I get that sometimes. Anyway, see you around.

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

Tomorrow she'd look up tattoo removal. They were doing big things with lasers now. When Cal was just a little more stable, she'd break up with him, gently, and then she'd begin her project of helping everybody she could help, and after that she'd head out on a great long journey to absolutely nowhere and write a gorgeous poem cycle steeped in heavenly lavender-scented closure and also utter despair, a poem cycle you could also actually ride for its aerobic benefits, and she'd pedal that fucker straight across the face of the earth until at some point she'd coast right off the edge, whereupon she'd giggle and say, Oh, shit.

I needed to talk to Vargina, to straighten this out, but felt suddenly faint, headed for the deli across the street. Just standing in the vicinity of comfort food was comfort. The schizophrenic glee with which you cold load your plastic shell with spinach salad, pork fried rice, turkey with cranberry, chicken with pesto, curried yams, clams casino, breadsticks, and yogurt, pay for it by the pound, this farm feed for human animals in black chinos and pleated chinos, animals whose enclosure included the entire island of Manhattan, this sensation I treasured deeply.

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

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

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.

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

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.

It was early, late, lockjaw hour.

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