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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

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Lynne Tillman
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Matter
Hard
Reconcile
Writing
Notion
Think
Oneself
Thinking
Write
Stills
Still
May

More quotes by Lynne Tillman

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Certainly there will always be stories.
Lynne Tillman
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Laughing and crying are very similar. Sometimes people go from laughing to crying, or crying to laughing. I remember being at someone's wedding and she couldn't stop laughing, through the whole ceremony. If she'd been crying, it would have seemed more normal, though.
Lynne Tillman
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People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.
Lynne Tillman
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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
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I'm very interested in animal behavior, and the relationship of human beings to other animal behavior.
Lynne Tillman
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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
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I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.
Lynne Tillman
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I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.
Lynne Tillman
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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
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I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.
Lynne Tillman
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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
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I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.
Lynne Tillman
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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
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There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.
Lynne Tillman
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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
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Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.
Lynne Tillman
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Obviously the Internet makes everything easier - you get people's addresses and so on and everything seems much more accessible.
Lynne Tillman
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[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
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As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.
Lynne Tillman
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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