Sam Lipsyte Quotes

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

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

I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.

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

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

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

The bullshit never ends. That’s the main thing to remember. It never ends.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Art is an artifice that you try to make seem natural.

Everything's weird if you stare at it.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

They weren’t like dolls, because dolls had no feelings. Kids had feelings, just not any remotely related to yours.

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

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

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.