Gordon Lish > Quotes

“It’s not what happens to people on the page; it’s about what happens to a reader in his heart and mind.”
― Gordon Lish

“Don't have stories; have sentences.”
― Gordon Lish

“He came to chat with me the day of my being discharged, advising that I not stay at the dog fight until the last dog was dead. I was a kid and made little counsel. Now that I am a bigger kid, I see the value--belatedly--added. Yet I also see the loss of life in the protecting, first of all, of oneself. Better to give oneself away. Dead f*ck the dog and so on.”
― Gordon Lish

“...I have come to be convinced that it is only the unbending observance of custom that sustains life in an urban circumstance.”
― Gordon Lish, What I Know So Far

“I had wanted to be amazing. I wanted to be so amazing. I had already been amazing up to a certain point. I wanted to go past that point. I wanted to be more amazing than I had been up to that point. I wanted to do something which went beyond that point and which went beyond every other point and which people would look at and say that this was something which went beyond all other points and which no other boy would ever be able to go beyond, that I was the only boy who could, that I was the only one.”
― Gordon Lish, What I Know So Far: Stories

“All my life I have never known what to do with my hands.
Except for shit like this.”
― Gordon Lish, Collected Fictions

“The day in April when Dr McKnight came to me to bid me goodbye, he made me promise to say a true thing to take a certain prominence among the lies by which my being among others made my being among them manageable for me.”
― Gordon Lish, White Plains: Pieces & Witherlings

“As for myself, I used to think it didn't put her in the best of lights for her to be going around being heard looking like somebody saying things like that.”
― Gordon Lish, Collected Fictions

“Off-load it all.
The whole sludgy gob of it.
Apropos of which, here's the first bit of it.
"Consider yourself kissed."
So how do you like it?—"Consider yourself kissed."
It's what my mother used to say to my sister.
Which is maybe why my sister once woke up once and then went ahead and swallowed more sleeping pills than I guess she guessed she was ever going to be able ever again to ever wake up from.”
― Gordon Lish, Collected Fictions

“Era a sensação que eu tinha - era o que sentia. Quando eu tinha seis anos, eu tinha a sensação de que eu era aquele que tinha que observar as coisas para as pessoas, que tinha que ver as coisas para as pessoas, que se eu não fizesse isso, então elas não seriam vistas.”
― Gordon Lish, Peru

“My bet is you are going to be really refreshingly impressed with it, or by it, which I have to tell you is what I myself was when the woman involved in the event disclosed her heart to me.”
― Gordon Lish, In the District, Into the Bargain