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It sometimes seemed to him that for love to work, it had to be fair, that he should tell only half the joke, and she the other half. Otherwise, it would not be love, but something completely else–pity or entertainment, or stand-up comedy.

Tao Lin

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Tao Lin
Age: 41
Born: 1983
Born: July 2
Novelist
Poet
Writer
City of Alexandria
Virginia
Work
Jokes
Something
Completely
Joke
Would
Comedy
Pity
Love
Stand
Fairs
Half
Fair
Tell
Entertainment
Else
Otherwise
Sometimes
Seemed

More quotes by Tao Lin

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It seems like most people will agree that they would like if they were treated by other people based on what they have concretely done in their life, not what other people have done, with their lives.
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Lately, they were always reassuring each other that nothing was wrong and probably it was true—life wasn’t supposed to be incredible, after all. Life wasn’t some incredible movie. Life was all the movies, ever, happening at once. There were good ones, bad ones, some went straight to video.
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The correct arrangement of words will make these bad feelings go away tonight.
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On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.
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Novels–and memoirs–are perhaps the most comprehensive reports humans can deliver, of their private experiences, to other humans. In these terms there is only one kind of novel: a human attempt to transfer or convey some part or version of their world of noumenon to another’s world of noumenon.
Tao Lin
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loneliness can fly a helicopter through a cut-out shape of a helicopter the same size as the helicopter and that's it's only skill and it isn't good enough but it's still amazing.
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I like reading books where people with a lot of money use it to do whatever they want. Like stay in expensive hotels and do whatever drugs they want and fly wherever they want.
Tao Lin
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I usually have Kafka biography in my bathroom. It's a book I can open at random and feel interested in immediately. It's really funny. With this book, since I'm opening it at random and immediately interested, I don't feel the need to read more than I want to read, in that there's not, like, a plot that leads me along. So I can stop whenever.
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My publisher had mailed [Bret Easton Ellis] Richard Yates. And when I talked to him he said he had read all my prose books. And he said something like, You got a lot of mileage out of Dakota Fanning.
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I don't know what Douglas Coupland thinks about his writing. I've read maybe one page of one of his books and didn't think I was similar to him. But it seems like people just compare you to anyone, pretty much.
Tao Lin
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But there was nothing I could do with the emotion really. It just went away after a while.
Tao Lin
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I think mostly the commodifying comes after I've done something that has some other value to me.
Tao Lin
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It seems like I'm not [happy]. Because if you look at my tweets and what I think and say, it seems like I'm worried about what's going to happen.
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I think everyone is racist, to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at, but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.
Tao Lin
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We have been sitting here all night bullshitting and we still don’t know what to do.
Tao Lin
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I just keep investing in the future, and I haven't reached the point where I'm not doing that.
Tao Lin
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Life has never died, which is something that I think people ignore.
Tao Lin
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Focusing on being a person instead of an Asian or an [anything] seems to promote a worldview that encourages people to treat others based on what each person has specifically done in their life, which seems like it would reduce such things as war, racism, unfairness, hate crimes, [other things most people feel aversion toward].
Tao Lin
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If I focused hard on getting a literary agent, and doing things like that, instead of designing my blog's header, I would have more money, I think. I think I don't view myself as an author. I view myself as a person. I view [anything] as part of being a person, so I feel okay with marketing or other things like that.
Tao Lin
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If you're, like, a PhD student in English, and you look at each instance that Richard Yates is mentioned in the book...it has sort of it's own narrative that one could analyze and write literary criticism about.
Tao Lin