Quote

There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.

Lynne Tillman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lynne Tillman
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Doesn
Character
Mean
Unlikable
Fascinating
Lots
Characters
Literature

More quotes by Lynne Tillman

Image
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
Image
I still do believe that form and content are very much related. I think throwing away some of the rule books on that is a good thing.
Lynne Tillman
Image
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
Image
Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.
Lynne Tillman
Image
People in the upper classes can just as easily be indifferent to their own body, or treat themselves as badly, as people who don't have the money. There are always differences among differences.
Lynne Tillman
Image
I'm the author of my own misery.
Lynne Tillman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Desire is a word I'm tired of. I've been living with that word for years. Yes, of course, we're all desiring machines. I have sometimes wondered what people would want, if there were no advertising. And death, what other subject is there? It's the subject. It's our subject. It's the great human dilemma, that we die and know we will.
Lynne Tillman
Image
The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.
Lynne Tillman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think the slowness of exchange is over, and the idea of waiting for a response - that's gone. People don't want to wait. It's all this instantaneity. That's fine. But it also makes writing different, if you're writing for an instant exchange compared with being able to have time for more reflection.
Lynne Tillman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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