Sam Lipsyte famous quotes

03-25-2025

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

#Bars #Energy #Weariness
I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.
-- Sam Lipsyte

#Empathy #Republic #Citizens
This country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them.
-- Sam Lipsyte

#Country #Honor #Bus
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

#Powerful #Mean #Rivers
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

#Romance #Hollywood #Bars
Stuff me in a tutu and let's screen experimental videos all day.
-- Sam Lipsyte

#Video #Stuff
Everything's weird if you stare at it.
-- Sam Lipsyte

#Staring
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

#Art #Kids #College
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

#Integrity #Moving #Book
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

#Stars #Book #Writing
There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Martenâ€™s prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.
-- Sam Lipsyte

#Pieces #Waste #Fiction
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

#Coffee #Suicidal #Home
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

#World #Emotion #Insight
Write what you know. Write what you don't know. But most of all, write what you'd rather not know.
-- Sam Lipsyte

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

#Children #Names #People
The bullshit never ends. Thatâ€™s the main thing to remember. It never ends.
-- Sam Lipsyte

#Bullshit #Remember #Ends
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 everyoneâ€™s thinking about their own problems and nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, â€˜Boy, I sure hope Sam finishes that chapter and gets one step closer to his dream of being a working writer.â€™ Nobody does that. If you want to write, it has to come from you. If you donâ€™t want to write, thatâ€™s great. Go do something else. That was a very liberating moment for me.
-- Sam Lipsyte

#Dream #Morning #Writing
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

#Believe #Thinking #Bullshit
Yes, we could solve for why, but we could also eat another slice of coconut cake.
-- Sam Lipsyte

#Cake #Coconuts #Solve
I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.
-- Sam Lipsyte

#Cliffs #Cocaine #Rappelling
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

#Live Life #Retreat #Serious
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

#Mistake #Errors #Office
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

#Feelings #Facts

You may also like:

Barry Hannah
Novelist
Ben Marcus
Author
Christine Schutt
Novelist
Gary Lutz
Writer
Gary Shteyngart
Writer
George Saunders
Writer
Gordon Lish
Writer
Heidi Julavits
Author
Jess Walter
Author
Jim Shepard
Author
Jonathan Ames
Author
Joshua Ferris
Author
Karen Russell
Novelist
Lorin Stein
Editor
Mark Leyner
Author
Mary Gaitskill
Author
Raymond Carver
Writer
Rick Moody
Novelist
Robert Lipsyte
Journalist
Wells Tower
Writer