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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
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Lynne Tillman
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Make
Sentence
Always
Sentences
Think
Leave
Thinking
Wonderful
Language
Beautiful
Find
Trying
Extraneous
More quotes by Lynne Tillman
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
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
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
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
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
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
[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
Certainly there will always be stories.
Lynne Tillman
You can think everything is dire, but you act as if there's possibility. I see children coming into the world as an expression of this. Sometimes, not always - it can just be somebody that wasn't on the birth control pill or didn't have access to abortion. But I usually see a wanted child as a sign of optimism, and I like that.
Lynne Tillman
Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.
Lynne Tillman
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
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
Kafka wrote the great line: my education has damaged me in ways I do not even know. And that's always been a signature motto for me.
Lynne Tillman
People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.
Lynne Tillman
Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.
Lynne Tillman
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
That's why our comics are important: they're pointing things out and laughing at the same time. There have been horrible, horrible times in history. They're mostly horrible times. But not to laugh? Not to find humor in something like dark optimism/bright pessimism - I think that's sad, frankly.
Lynne Tillman
I'm the author of my own misery.
Lynne Tillman
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
It's easy, at this point in my life, very easy to write a beautiful sentence that's meaningless. A lot of writers do that. But I don't want it to be meaningless. I want it to actually say what I want it to say, and so I'm thinking about it again and again and again.
Lynne Tillman
