Gilbert Sorrentino Quotes

• …and to all you other cats and chicks out there, sweet or otherwise, buried deep in wordy tombs, who never yet have walked from off the page, a shake and a hug and a kiss and a drink. Cheers!

  Gilbert Sorrentino

  Sweet, Cheer, Cat

  45 Copy quote

• They want politics and think it will save them. At best, it gives direction to their numbed desires. But there is no politics but the manipulation of power through language. Thus the latter’s constant debasement.

  Gilbert Sorrentino

  Thinking, Giving, Desire

  Gilbert Sorrentino (1973). “Splendide-Hotel: Meditation on Rimbaud”, p.17, New Directions Publishing

  6 Copy quote

• What is this thing called a kiss? French, tongue, soul, chaste, motherly, fatherly, brotherly, sisterly, ass, genital, Judas, trembling, rough, hesitant, sweet, soft, wet, dying, fevered, good-night, farewell, burning, and chocolate.

  Gilbert Sorrentino

  Good Night, Sweet, Farewell

  4 Copy quote

• All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.

  Gilbert Sorrentino

  Reality, Thinking, Years

  4 Copy quote

• What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?

  Gilbert Sorrentino

  Husband, Writing, Long

  Gilbert Sorrentino (1971). “Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things”

  6 Copy quote

• The maimings of love are endlessly funny.

  Gilbert Sorrentino

  Gilbert Sorrentino (2012). “The Moon in Its Flight”, p.8, Coffee House Press

  4 Copy quote

• It is no wonder lesbians love women.

  Gilbert Sorrentino

  Wonder

  4 Copy quote

• Rapacity plus taste is a formidable combination, since it so often passes for intelligence. One pities the artist in a world of such predators, all of whom are deeply engaged in the arts too.

  Gilbert Sorrentino

  Art, World, Predator

  Gilbert Sorrentino (1971). “Imaginative qualities of actual things”, Small PressDistribution

  4 Copy quote

• Art cannot save anybody from anything.

  Gilbert Sorrentino

  Art

  4 Copy quote

• Notable American Women gives us, with great panache and in eerie detail, a world that is cruelly reasonable within the near-religious limitations of its weird laws and customs. It is a book as unique as it is wonderfully strange.

  Gilbert Sorrentino

  Religious, Book, Unique

  4 Copy quote

• On Being Blue celebrates both language and that which it represents and carefully draws our attention to that difficult middle ground on which the writer finds himself in lifelong struggle to join the two without sullying or smearing the clarities of either.

  Gilbert Sorrentino

  Struggle, Blue, Two

  4 Copy quote

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