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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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Lynne Tillman
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: January 1
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More quotes by Lynne Tillman
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
There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.
Lynne Tillman
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
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
Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.
Lynne Tillman
I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.
Lynne Tillman
I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.
Lynne Tillman
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
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
Obviously the Internet makes everything easier - you get people's addresses and so on and everything seems much more accessible.
Lynne Tillman
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
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
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
People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.
Lynne Tillman
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
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
I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.
Lynne Tillman
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
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
Now that I am conscious of the world of chronic pain, when I see somebody walking down the street who's having trouble, I feel a sadness for them. I notice.
Lynne Tillman
