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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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Lynne Tillman
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Able
Gave
Wanted
Comfort
Great
Started
Writing
Create
World
Pleasure
Reading
Write
Eight
Around
Seven

More quotes by Lynne Tillman

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I'm the author of my own misery.
Lynne Tillman
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I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience.
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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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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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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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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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
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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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Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.
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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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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I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.
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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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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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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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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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 learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.
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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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