Gary Lutz Quotes

United States, Writer
October 26, 1955

Gary Lutz is an American writer of both poetry and fiction. His work has appeared in Sleepingfish, NOON, The Quarterly, Conjunctions, Unsaid, Fence, StoryQuarterly, The Believer, Cimarron Review, 3rd Bed, Slate Magazine, New York Tyrant, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Apocalypse Reader , PP/FF: An Anthology

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

Gary Lutz
- Problem
- Dollars
- Stores
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.

Gary Lutz
- Grace
- Supreme
- Precision

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.

Gary Lutz
- Book
- Short
- Extraordinary
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.

Gary Lutz
- Writing
- Space
- Careers
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.

Gary Lutz
- Mother
- Behinds
- Taught
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.

Gary Lutz
- Night
- Simple
- Sometimes
You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.

Gary Lutz
- Wonder
- Tired
- Youth
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."

Gary Lutz
- Believe
- Writing
- Enough

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

Gary Lutz
- Life
- Having
- Could
The writer, as I see it, has the right of way, so it's up to the reader to look out.

Gary Lutz
- Way
- Right
- Writer