People gave names to things so they could tell stories about them, goddam fairy tales about children who got out alive.
Sam LipsyteI am a writer who is definitely working with a specific language and more than English, that language is American. And I work very much in idiom and am very interested in the play of different kinds of rhetoric, whether it is the more high-flown stuff that reeks of age. I love to juxtapose something like that with something more current or urgent. I am always interested not in America by itself, but America as an idea and how that idea has changed over time, in the eyes of the rest of the world and in the eyes of Americans.
Sam LipsyteOne 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 everyoneโs thinking about their own problems and nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, โBoy, I sure hope Sam finishes that chapter and gets one step closer to his dream of being a working writer.โ Nobody does that. If you want to write, it has to come from you. If you donโt want to write, thatโs great. Go do something else. That was a very liberating moment for me.
Sam LipsyteI had a teacher once who said, "If you are going to write fiction, you should only read poetry." I have always been interested in the writers who care about their sentences and who really work on that level. I have always said that I hate writing, I love revision. So, the language is really important to me. And the comedy and the horror that come out of the language.
Sam Lipsyte