Top 20 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

I've been within an inch of my life.

The narrators get into trouble and make fools of themselves with their perversely impulsive fondlings of the language. These people have retreated from the world, in which they keep falling short, and into language, where they fall even shorter. The narrators aggrandize their every plaint and lurid insight into verbal formations that betray their fatuity as speakers and even as hosts of their own bodies and souls.

If I believe in anything when it comes to writing, and I can't stress enough that I detest writing, it's something that sticks with me not from any English class but from some awfully recondite driver's ed. seminars I had the privilege to audit during my mid-teens, and to this day I probably misunderstand it anyway. It's the term "right of way."

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

I was a great many far cries from myself.

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.

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.

I learned to read but not to comprehend, and that might well have stood me in good stead, because what's there to understand, really? Everything I later learned to understand was unspeakably ugly anyway. In time, I bought some rulebooks and squeezed my way onto the honor roll, but, decades later, I've been pointed toward people described as "actively dying" who only now and then seemed to be going about it friskily.There was mostly no hustle I could notice.

There's much too much mismating in the Microsofted phrasery of our day. And I like sentences that are societies unto themselves and shun any need for paragraphic shelter and fellowship. But I don't like seeing paper going to waste, either.

I have never felt at ease in language. I did not grow up among books or among people who read them. I heard words emerge from mouths but didn't get the hang of how people hung the things out as if on lines to get their gripes and recreational distempers yowlingly known.

Desks are terrible places, no matter how many wheels a chair might have. You can't do much about how drawers fill up.

I prefer the sorts of words that go their own way and are very choosy about where they end up. They don't fall for the first frillily syllabled thing to come along.

What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life.

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.

I don't like to read or write about life in its tiring entirety. Most days, months, even years are just filler between those few moments of modest but decisive catastrophe, misfortunes so fittingly flimsy they're almost welcome. The heart doesn't storm that often on its own, so you have to wait for something outside of yourself to get the wrecking ball rolling, and then you're set: you've finally got an impression to make on others - you're in the world distinctly and distinguishable now. It's only by our ravages that we're recognizable to each other at last.

The writer, as I see it, has the right of way, so it's up to the reader to look out.

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

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.

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.