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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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Lynne Tillman
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Stop
Wedding
Though
Crying
Someone
Similar
Remember
Seemed
Whole
Cry
Sometimes
Couldn
Would
Normal
People
Laughing
Ceremony

More quotes by 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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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 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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There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.
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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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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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
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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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Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.
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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Certainly there will always be stories.
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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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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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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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
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I'm very interested in animal behavior, and the relationship of human beings to other animal behavior.
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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People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.
Lynne Tillman
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I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.
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