Lynne Tillman Quotes

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.

We do not select the stories we write, we do not pick the voices. They take us by surprise and we surrender to them. They write us, they write in us, all over us, through us. They occupy us. We are, in a sense, puppets--to language, with language.

The television was on. It had been on for hours. Years. It was there. TV on demand, a great freedom. Hadn't Burroughs said there was more freedom today than ever before. Wasn't that like saying things were more like today than they've ever been.

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.

The desire to catch, as Bonnard hoped, the PASSING MOMENT is antithetical to being in the moment. The photographer is an observer to others' moments. The Picture People have dedicated themselves to this paradox, and consign themselves on either side of the equation.

There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.

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.

The right to pursue happiness sends me and other Americans, even here where we are meant to resist outside temptation, on a hunt for it. If I'm not hungry, I might seek other forms of happiness, or pleasure, which is part of my American birthright, though the most misconceived notion of them or the most difficult to realize; I can pursue several means and ways to be happy, if I am able to forget what makes me habitually sad.

I once heard that the French don't prosecute people who commit crimes of passion twenty minutes after waking.

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.

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.

A book coming out into the world can be a harsh, harsh time. And your feelings are on the line. Everything that publication is about is really not what your writing is about. Your writing is coming out of something else, and publication and being in the public are something else. And those of us who have published, in whatever way we're published, are very fortunate.

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.

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.

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.

I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.

I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience.

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.

She thought: my work cannot protect me. I will be true to my fantasies, even when I don't recognize them. What I make is not entirely in my power, as conscious as I try to be. It's always in my hands and out of my hands, too. I like to look at things, because they make me feel good, even when they make me feel bad. I'm proud to be melancholic. I like to make things, because they usually make me feel good. I am not satisfied with the world, so I add to it. My desires are on display. What I make I love and hate.

Certainly there will always be stories,

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.

It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.

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."

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.

No escape from patterns and systems, no exits. Nothing, and no one, resides outside a system; that's the way it is. Nothing outside the inside, the inside is also outside, etc.

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.

Reality disappoints regularly. When people are supposed to have fun, it's likely they won't, because fun can't live up to its image. Does anything live up to its image?

People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.

I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.

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.

There may be an art to conversation, and some are better at it than others, but conversation's virtue lies in randomness and possibility: people, without a plan, could speak a spontaneous, unexpected truth, because revelation rules. Telling words recur in this smart, generous conversation between Stephen Andrews and Gregg Bordowitz: patience, responsibility, feminism, ethics, cosmology, AIDS, gift, freedom, mortality.

I like to believe I enjoy surprises, that I'm someone to whom an eruption of the unusual should be usual, or who branches out to advance the implausible. I might fly a jet, become a man, walk backward without a care, threaten like a stalker, speak freely at all times, swim the Atlantic on a greasy back, be silent for months like a Carthusian ...

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.

[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.

Courage in an artist or writer is different from the courage of firefighters, who rescue people and risk their own lives. Artistic courage might be conceptualized as an internal drama about overcoming rules or inhibitions, dicta of all kinds, the art a manifestation or result of a multitude of processes.

As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.

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.