Top 36 Lynne Tillman Quotes
#1. I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.
Lynne Tillman
#2. I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience.
Lynne Tillman
#3. People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.
Lynne Tillman
#4. Now that I am conscious of the world of chronic pain, when I see somebody walking down the street who's having trouble, I feel a sadness for them. I notice.
Lynne Tillman
#5. Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.
Lynne Tillman
#6. You learn to read in kindergarten or first grade, and suddenly there's this other world that isn't your family or your school or your friends. It's something else.
Lynne Tillman
#7. Whatever the style is, I want to have a sense that the writer is thinking, and really trying to get at something, and that there's a sense of discovery as the writing goes along.
Lynne Tillman
#8. There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.
Lynne Tillman
#9. As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.
Lynne Tillman
#10. I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all. I'm interested in the ways that I think people want to relate.
Lynne Tillman
#11. I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.
Lynne Tillman
#12. I'm very interested in animal behavior, and the relationship of human beings to other animal behavior.
Lynne Tillman
#13. When I'm choosing things, there's a level of intelligence I want to peel off, whether it's written in terribly simple sentences, whether it's from the point of view of a dog, or a 15-year-old boy.
Lynne Tillman
#14. It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.
Lynne Tillman
#15. I would never want to write a character who was not thoroughly herself or himself. She's a very specific creature in my mind, and she has her thoughts, which range from skin to American history, philosophy, and the arts.
Lynne Tillman
#16. In depression, you're flattened. Your energy level is gone. When I'm anxious, I tend to have more energy. But it depends on the nature of the anxiety. The anxiety to finish something would seem to be more productive than the anxiety that says, "You're feeling sick."
Lynne Tillman
#17. I do think we think repetitively. It's so hard to get certain thoughts out of your head. If you're angry at a friend, you're going to keep going back to that conversation.
Lynne Tillman
#18. Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that.
Lynne Tillman
#19. Reading gave me great comfort and pleasure. When I started being able to write, around seven or eight, I wanted to be able to do that myself, to create that other world.
Lynne Tillman
#20. It wasn't that I wanted to be an artist. But when I took my first drawing class with the painter Doug Ohlson, I could never finish a drawing.
Lynne Tillman
#21. I don't have the education of an art historian. I've certainly read about art and look at art and have educated myself to some extent. But I'm not a skilled or thorough art historian and I wouldn't call myself an art critic.
Lynne Tillman
#22. In a practical sense, pain kept me from sitting down as much, so that sometimes I would have to stand to write. Not that I would necessarily have gotten anywhere anyway. But it definitely set me back to be in so much pain.
Lynne Tillman
#23. When something in a sequence is edited, if you repeat an image, but in a different place, the effect is different. Because the brain is remembering, and the different juxtaposition triggers other memories, thoughts, ideas, and so on.
Lynne Tillman
#24. My friends and I sometimes laugh at each other that there is so much maintenance of a body. I paid no attention when I was younger.
Lynne Tillman
#25. [Reality] isn't simply the so-called world that you're in. Your reality is a much larger one that takes in all matter of identification and desires and hopes.
Lynne Tillman
#26. You could say this word is better to use than that word, this sentence is good and that sentence isn't. But you don't determine the value of your work for other people.
Lynne Tillman
#27. I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.
Lynne Tillman
#28. People, no matter the economic class, find ways to feed their narcissism.
Lynne Tillman
#29. You have to create the space for the possibility of people speaking as they do. If writing is supposed to lead us in any way or educate or suggest other ways of being, it can't do so by simply reflecting what's considered to be realistic.
Lynne Tillman
#31. People in the upper classes can just as easily be indifferent to their own body, or treat themselves as badly, as people who don't have the money. There are always differences among differences.
Lynne Tillman
#32. I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.
Lynne Tillman
#33. I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence.
Lynne Tillman
#34. Now that I'm an older woman, I'm so much more aware of the changes - almost too aware. I feel sorry for being so dismissive. You have to think about what you're thinking about and realize that you're thinking it.
Lynne Tillman
#35. I think it's very hard to reconcile oneself to the notion that it may not matter what you think if you still want to write.
Lynne Tillman
#36. It's true you have to screen out a lot living in the city. I stayed away from New York for a long time after college, and when I was first back, I'd read The Village Voice and feel like I was having a panic attack.
Lynne Tillman
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