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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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Lynne Tillman
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Think
Changes
Thinking
Realize
Realizing
Almost
Woman
Dismissive
Feel
Aware
Feels
Sorry
Much
Older

More quotes by Lynne Tillman

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I think the major device for me is that narrator's voice. I'm always trying to find a different kind of form to tell whatever story it is, and I wish that weren't so, because it drives me crazy.
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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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 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
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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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I'd studied English literature and American history, but the English literature, which I thought was going to be helpful to me in an immediate way, was the opposite. So I had to un-think a lot of things and move out of my own head, and I learned a lot. It was like graduate school, but an un-graduate school or an un-school.
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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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
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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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The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.
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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[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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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
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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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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
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Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.
Lynne Tillman
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You could say this word is better to use than that word, this sentence is good and that sentence isn't. But you don't determine the value of your work for other people.
Lynne Tillman
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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
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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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There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.
Lynne Tillman