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I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience.
Lynne Tillman
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Lynne Tillman
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Writers
Experience
Many
Believe
Really
Think
Thinking
Traumatic
Published
More quotes by 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
Obviously the Internet makes everything easier - you get people's addresses and so on and everything seems much more accessible.
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
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
People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.
Lynne Tillman
I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.
Lynne Tillman
I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.
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
As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.
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
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
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