I 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 LipsyteThis country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them.
Sam LipsyteYou think you know yourself, the world. You believe you've got a bead on everybody else's bullshit, but what about your own?
Sam LipsyteKamby 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 LipsyteNo 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 LipsyteThe translator has to be a good writer. The translator has to hear music too. And it might not be exactly your music because the translator needs to translate the music. And so, that is what you are hoping for: a translator who gets what you are doing but who also gets all the ways in which it won't work in the new language.
Sam Lipsyte