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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

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Lynne Tillman
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Heard
Story
Sense
Plugged
Doesn
Reflect
Stories
Realistic
Something
Page
Pages
Conversation

More quotes by 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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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 the author of my own misery.
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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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
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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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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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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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As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.
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 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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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
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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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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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[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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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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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
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I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.
Lynne Tillman
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People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.
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