Sam Lipsyte Quotes & Sayings

This country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them. — Sam Lipsyte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Sam Lipsyte

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

I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness came over me. — Sam Lipsyte

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy. — Sam Lipsyte

I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy. — Sam Lipsyte

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. — Sam Lipsyte

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

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

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

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

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. — Sam Lipsyte

Wesley Stace has always been the only genuinely gifted fiction writer who also happens to be a rock star, but Wonderkid is the book he was born to write. And if you prefer your novels brazen, poignant and hilarious, as I do, you were born to read it. Like a great show, this will stay with you long after the last cymbal crash and power strum. — Sam Lipsyte

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

I was glad I'd remembered to shucksify my vocabulary in the company of children. — Sam Lipsyte

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

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. [ ... ] — Sam Lipsyte

Oh, do you, Milo? You're so selfish. You don't see the bigger picture." "What's the bigger picture?" "You're still here looking for handouts. Who's going to take care of me?" "I'm on my knees here, Mom. Not for me, for my family. For my wife. For a beautiful grandson you have totally ignored." "He's kind of a brat. I'll be in his life when he gets a little impulse control." "He's not even four." "I have needs. I'm tired of this child-worshipping culture. You're just a slave to it, Milo." "I'm only trying to be a decent dad." "Don't waste your time. It's not in your genes. Besides, try making some money. That might be a good dad move. For heaven's sake, the system's rigged for white men and you still can't tap in." "You're right, Mom. What can I say? But still, it would mean a lot to me if you made a little more of an effort with Bernie." "Bernie schmernie. This is my decade." "Okay, you wrinkled old spidercunt, have it your way. — Sam Lipsyte

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

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

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

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

I was also one of those people who hadn't caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her in high school, but I was still stuck in the last virtual community, a sad place to be, like Europe, say, during the Black Death. Whenever I cruised this site, with its favorites lists and its paeans to somebody's cousin's gas station art gallery, I could not help but think of medieval corpses in the spring-thaw mud, buboes sprouted in every armpit and anus, black bile curling out of frozen mouths. Those of us still cursed with life wandered the blasted dales of this stricken network, wept and moaned and flogged ourselves with frayed AC adaptors, called out for God to strike us dead, or else let us find somebody who liked similar bands. — Sam Lipsyte

Everything's weird if you stare at it. — Sam Lipsyte

Write what you know. Write what you don't know. But most of all, write what you'd rather not know. — Sam Lipsyte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Sam Lipsyte

It was early, late, lockjaw hour. — Sam Lipsyte

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

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

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. — Sam Lipsyte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, yes, I should have just surrendered, cinched the entitled scion her little pouch of entitlements, put in my calls to the name shufflers, done my duty. I thought about that moment later on. Maybe I got extratuned to the concept of bitchhood once I became Purdy's, though I must confess I've always found such usage of the term for female dogs distasteful. My mother was a second-wave feminist. I wasn't comfortable saying "cunt" until I was twenty-three, at which point, admittedly, I couldn't hold back for a time. — Sam Lipsyte

The bullshit never ends. That's the main thing to remember. It never ends. — Sam Lipsyte

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. — Sam Lipsyte

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

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

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

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

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. — Sam Lipsyte

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

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