The Art of Tetman Callis

“I’ve come to believe that Frenchmen are really nothing but Germans with chic accents” – Stephen M. Silverman, The Quarterly 2, Summer 1987

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“If a society believes that the most important thing is to be first, much that is evil will pass for good, while the voice of the truly necessary innovator gets lost in the general hubbub of originality. In the meantime, for better or worse the world is speeded up, perhaps to the point of panic […]

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“All fear the witch, and so I do. Quiet times are what we’re owed. Men alive are trouble. Makers.” – E. J. Cullen to Q, The Quarterly 1, Spring 1987

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“I leave a lot out when I tell the truth.” – Amy Hempel to Q, The Quarterly 1, Spring 1987

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“Alcibiades. He was the Golden Boy of 4th century Athenian culture. Pericles was his guardian, Plato his teacher. A fine athlete, a brilliant general, handsome, marvelously intelligent, popular, everything. A summation of the Golden Age. And what happened? He went bad. He was vain, treacherous, selfish, sacrilegious, debauched, dishonest, and a traitor twice over. His […]

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“I have come to be convinced that it is only the unbending observance of custom that sustains life in an urban circumstance.” – Gordon Lish, What I Know So Far

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“Why would I want to tell people made-up stories? I can’t stand made-up stories. It makes me sick to hear a made-up story. Look, if your story is a made-up story, then do me a favor and keep it to yourself. Me, I would never tell a made-up story about anything, let alone about myself. […]

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“People are just sickening. Plain and simple, people are really just plain sickening. Where is the rhyme or reason to it? There is no rhyme or reason to it. You know what? Let me tell you what. I pity you if you think the day will ever come when you can count on people. You […]

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“Mrs. Smith runs out into the street shrieking and screaming, ‘Spare the children, spare the children, dear God in heaven, couldn’t you at least do something to make them stop and spare the children!’ Suddenly there is all of a sudden a bolt of lightning and thundering and here is what God answers the woman. […]

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“Tell the truth. Tell it, knowing that no matter how hard you try, you’re still not telling it truly. The very act, the very elapsing of time between the concept and the utterance already allows one to shield or protect oneself. Musicians, painters, sculptors and the like are given much more room to tell the […]

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“Life’s a war zone. Death’s the sanctuary. You want to be safe?” – Gordon Lish, Conversations with Gordon Lish (eds. David Winters and Jason Lucarelli)

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“Even when we’re hysterical or frightened to death, we’re deploying the vanities and falsifications of performance. What’s not an act? Even in seeming solitude, do we not feel ourselves called upon to dissemble for the gods?” – Gordon Lish, Conversations with Gordon Lish (eds. David Winters and Jason Lucarelli)

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“There is no realm wherein we have the truth. All endeavor is an act.” – Gordon Lish, Conversations with Gordon Lish (eds. David Winters and Jason Lucarelli)

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“No fiction can render its object, or even an aspect of its object. A fiction renders a fiction, making the making of fictions an inexhaustible activity.” – Gordon Lish, Conversations with Gordon Lish (eds. David Winters and Jason Lucarelli)

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“Doing great literary composition is an act for grown-ups, not for children, and one can perform these acts importantly only when one is entirely alert to every nuance of what is at issue in the making of compositions.” – Gordon Lish, Conversations with Gordon Lish (eds. David Winters and Jason Lucarelli)

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“Everything wants your failure. The body that you inhabit, the time that is yours, the circumstances of your life, every particularity that can be summoned to the general spectacle of your enterprise through space and time, can be seen as an interference to doing great art—nothing more efficiently than the mortality that is your due. […]

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“Writing isn’t lonely in the most important sense, because when you do it, you are in touch with your best friend, so the loneliness can be abridged in those terms. Also, a writer can suppose to himself that by doing his work, he is fashioning a bridge to other lone souls in space and time—that […]

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“To be a writer, one has to tell the truth, and one has to tell the hardest truth that is available to one. One has to tell one’s own truth. One has to risk everything to capture that truth; one has to reach down inside of oneself to the zone of most crucial danger, to […]

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