Lynne Tillman Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  Sorry, Thinking, Realizing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Lynne Tillman

  Want, Dialogue, Heard

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Laughing, Attention, Maintenance

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Wanting to know all kinds of things is perfect for novelists, because novelists are generalists. We're not specialists in anything, except, hopefully, writing.

  Lynne Tillman

  Writing, Perfect, Kind

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• I'm not interested in safety. A great risk in writing is imagining you have something to protect. Playing it safe to placate someone or something. People talk about compromise, but often people don't even know when they're compromising, because they're not conscious of contradictions.

  Lynne Tillman

  Writing, People, Safety

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• The idea of equality is misunderstood. I wouldn't ever argue that everyone is the same, but that differences should not be hierarchical. Attitudes and expectations have been imposed on both men and women. For instance, men had very little to do with the raising of their children before the women's movement. The women's movement has freed men to become more active as fathers. We're living in a period of transition, but change can be much slower than we want, with unintended consequences, and can also be happening without our seeing it.

  Lynne Tillman

  Children, Attitude, Father

  The Believer interview, artwriting.sva.edu. December 23, 2017.

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• I don't know what a natural thought process is.

  Lynne Tillman

  Natural

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When you free women so they can choose to have or not to have, or to conceive - that's something that, for millennia, women couldn't do. Biology was, in many ways, destiny. We wouldn't be talking about gender if women could not control their pregnancies.

  Lynne Tillman

  Pregnancy, Destiny, Biology

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• I learned to write from reading. I had no writing classes. It's part of my thinking as the writer-author, reading, but then I also want to bring this into my characters, who also read and think. There's that great quote from Virginia Woolf - it's very simple: "...books continue each other." I think when you're a writer, you're also, hopefully, a reader, and you're bringing those earlier works into your work.

  Lynne Tillman

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• If you're a "good" teacher, somebody who is responsible or careful, teaching takes time. Teaching is performative. Students nowadays evaluate you and there's a lot made in these evaluations about how you perform. Maybe you don't have the greatest delivery in the world. But you know a lot, have a lot to offer. So that's pretty unsettling. We've become so image-based and performance-based as a society. You have to be ready to appear on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" at any moment.

  Lynne Tillman

  Teacher, Teaching, World

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• There's not usually one reason why we do anything and, in fact, often we don't know why we've done what we've done, especially what we have said or why, for instance, in conversation, which can be very tricky. Finally, we say something and think, "Why did we say that?" In retrospect we might know.

  Lynne Tillman

  Thinking, Done, Reason

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• I think about material that could work in the novel or story as I'm writing. I see if I can get there through what's happening with the character. But it's by inclination. It's not "At this moment this will happen." Usually with my characters you can't tell what has induced them to do anything. That's because, from my understanding of reality - which is always subjective - everything is overdetermined.

  Lynne Tillman

  Writing, Character, Reality

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• I think that sense of surprise, that you don't know where something is going, or what's going to happen, even as you write, that you're making it up as you go along - that's important to me. It's not a question of shock or surprise in a gimmicky way. It's that as you read, you become more deeply into something and into what happens, and become more involved and engaged, you're learning something or you're appreciating something or seeing something differently - that's what's surprising.

  Lynne Tillman

  Writing, Thinking, Appreciate

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• I think some people are not interesting to themselves. They're the sad, resigned folk. When people call themselves ordinary - "I'm just an ordinary person" - you do wonder what they mean, because people who call themselves ordinary occasionally turn out to be serial killers. Beware of those who say they're ordinary.

  Lynne Tillman

  Mean, Thinking, People

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• If I have to work on something for too long, then it must be wrong. At a certain point, if I've worked on a sentence for about an hour, then I realize that it's probably not the right sentence and means I'm trying to make something fit that's ungainly.

  Lynne Tillman

  Mean, Long, Trying

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all.

  Lynne Tillman

  Reality, Realism, Not Interested

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Writers don't want to appear to be stupid. I don't know - maybe people become writers so that they can prove that they're not. Of course getting a book published doesn't mean that they're not stupid. At a certain point you have to stop trying to prove something and write because you need to think about something and want to communicate, in a very broad sense.

  Lynne Tillman

  Stupid, Book, Writing

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• I've always liked elliptical writing, whether it's Kafka or Paula Fox, and I'm often bored by writers who explain too much. I think that becomes journalism. Mostly I don't try to explain to readers who somebody is - I just write about the somebody. I'm thinking through ideas. And I have the sense that, if you're reading this, you have some interest.

  Lynne Tillman

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• Conversation on the page should reflect what the story is about. It doesn't have to be "realistic" in the sense that it's something you heard and plugged into a story.

  Lynne Tillman

  Stories, Pages, Realistic

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition. 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. Not beautiful in the sense of "oh it's flowy" but in the sense that it really does what it's supposed to do, it what I want it to say.

  Lynne Tillman

  Beautiful, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• A friend of mine, a poet, Rebecca Wolff recently said to me, "You know, your stories are really voice-driven," and I guess I knew that already, but it's so true that I can't get something going unless I can hear the voice.

  Lynne Tillman

  Voice, Stories, Poet

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.

  Lynne Tillman

  Waiting, World, Dutch

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• I unlearned the model of being an editor like Ezra Pound with T.S. Eliot, the unconscious belief that America was the center of the world, and that honesty meant saying what I thought and always being direct.

  Lynne Tillman

  Honesty, Editors, America

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• Any writer knows that what's left out is as essential, if not more so, than what's there. Unlearning works that way.

  Lynne Tillman

  Essentials, Way, Knows

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.

  Lynne Tillman

  Europe, Taught, Unlearn

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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