Gary Lutz Quotes & Sayings

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

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

I've been within an inch of my life. — Gary Lutz

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

A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same. — Gary Lutz

You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth. — Gary Lutz

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

Most days what I felt was this: the minute you put a first name and a last name together, you've got a pair of tusks coming right at you (i.e., Watch out, buddy). but on days when I didn't disapprove of everything on principle
days when the whole cologned, cuff-shooting ruck of my co-workers didn't repulse me from the moment they disembarked from the sixth-floor elevator and began squidging their way along the carpeted track that led to the office
my thinking stabbed more along these lines: a name belittles that which is named. Give a person a name and he'll sink right into it, right into the hollows and the dips of the letters that spelled out the whole insultingly reductive contraption, so that you have to pull him up and dance him out of it, take his attendance, and fuck some life into him if you expect to get any work out of him. Multiply him by twenty-two and you will have some idea of what the office was like, except that a good third of my colleagues were female. — Gary Lutz

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

The job required the luxurious useless indoor fortitude it has always been my fortune to enjoy. — Gary Lutz

The boss had a long list of reasons for letting me go
most of which, I am ashamed to admit, were generously understated. It's true, for instance, that I hogged the photocopier for hours on end and snapped at whoever politely
deferentially
inquired about how much longer I would be. I was intent on achieving definitively sooty, penumbral effects to ensure that copies looked like copies, and that, of course, took time. Some days I spent entire afternoons reproducing blank sheets of paper, ream after ream, to use instead of the "FROM THE DESK OF
" notepads the boss kept ordering for each of us. — Gary Lutz

What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life? — Gary Lutz

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

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

If I have a problem, it is this: there is a store where everything costs a dollar. — Gary Lutz

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

I was a great many far cries from myself. — Gary Lutz

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

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

I don't know which is finally sicker
specifics or engulfing abstractions. — Gary Lutz

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

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

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