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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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Lynne Tillman
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Works
Writer
Left
Way
Unlearning
Essential
Essentials

More quotes by 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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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
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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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Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.
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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There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.
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'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 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
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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'm the author of my own misery.
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 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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I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.
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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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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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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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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Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.
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