Gary Lutz quotes:

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.

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.

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

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.

I've been within an inch of my life.

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.

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

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

Here is a story in the worst way. I have no business being anywhere in it. It comes between me and the life I have coming.

I had to piece together a diet for her, too. I knew which combinations of which foods on which days would rehang everything that was draped so delicately beneath her skin. In a matter of months, the body under the smock was organized anew, redistributed

They weren't hours, these classes; they weren't even forty-five minutes--they were "periods," which sounded to me as if they were each at once a little era and then the end you had to see decisively put to it.

I was a great many far cries from myself.

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

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.

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.