Sam Lipsyte on Gordon Lish:
“Gordon said many things that I will never forget, but the one thing that I always think about is that he said once, ‘There is no getting to the good part. It all has to be the good part.’ And so I think that when people are writing their novels they are just thinking about the story, about what has to happen so their character can get to Cleveland. And they are just typing; they don’t care about the sentences. And what are we here for if not the sentences.”
Full story/interview (by editor Gerald Howard) here.
Bonus track: my San Francisco Chronicle review of Lipsyte’s first novel, The Subject Steve.
Sweet!