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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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Lynne Tillman
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
People
Focused
Told
Story
Less
Stories

More quotes by 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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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 subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.
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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Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.
Lynne Tillman
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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
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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
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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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Whatever the style is, I want to have a sense that the writer is thinking, and really trying to get at something, and that there's a sense of discovery as the writing goes along.
Lynne Tillman
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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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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
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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
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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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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
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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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I'm the author of my own misery.
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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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
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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
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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