Lynne Tillman
I'm the author of my own misery.Collection: Misery
Boring people don't know they're boring. That's the problem with boring people.Collection: People
I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.Collection: Thinking
Desire is a word I'm tired of. I've been living with that word for years. Yes, of course, we're all desiring machines. I have sometimes wondered what people would want, if there were no advertising. And death, what other subject is there? It's the subject. It's our subject. It's the great human dilemma, that we die and know we will.Collection: Tired
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.Collection: Beautiful
That's why our comics are important: they're pointing things out and laughing at the same time. There have been horrible, horrible times in history. They're mostly horrible times. But not to laugh? Not to find humor in something like dark optimism/bright pessimism - I think that's sad, frankly.Collection: Dark
Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.Collection: Pepsi
I'm bothered, as a reader, when I feel the writer is filling in too much. Again, whether it's nonfiction or fiction, I think writers are providing a kind of template or platform for thinking and imagining.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Jobs
There may be an art to conversation, and some are better at it than others, but conversation's virtue lies in randomness and possibility: people, without a plan, could speak a spontaneous, unexpected truth, because revelation rules. Telling words recur in this smart, generous conversation between Stephen Andrews and Gregg Bordowitz: patience, responsibility, feminism, ethics, cosmology, AIDS, gift, freedom, mortality.Collection: Art
Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.Collection: Regret
It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.Collection: Reader
Without curiosity a writer is dead.Collection: Curiosity
Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.Collection: Fun
Jokes are great capsules of information. I think they should never be censored. They often are offensive - and we're offended by different things - but I believe deeply in what Freud wrote of their relationship to the unconscious, which is that jokes come to help us. We laugh so as to dispense with, or to express, some ambivalence or discomfort with the things around us. That's what laughing is: a release.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: People
I don't believe a picture is worth a thousand words, unless they're very confusing words.Collection: Believe
I'm not just interested in the thoughts I have, but also in others' thoughts, and why not carry those forward? That's why American fiction can be so thin. All these fears, like not seeming to be original - I mean, hell, most stuff isn't. The question is whether you can articulate your thoughts for the moment in which you're living, which is a different time. Say them in a newer way. There are new events, and language changes - sensibilities change. We are writing in and of the time we're in. Oh, it's a weird time.Collection: Writing
I think political situations usually work their way into my writing, but not necessarily in an explicit way. The environment is so chaotic now. There is someone so entirely unreliable in charge, and reliable only in the fact that Thing - I don't say his name - is a pathological narcissist. He's going to do whatever he can to defend himself and whatever will make him look good. That's what matters to him.Collection: Writing
Certainly there will always be stories.Collection: Stories
What I don't like about teaching is hearing myself say the same thing. I mean, you just want to sort of shoot yourself after a while. But you don't have a million different ways of thinking about what you have been thinking about for many years. And then there's the truism that you're only as good as your students. If they're not into what's going on, it doesn't matter who you are.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Beautiful
I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.Collection: World
Ulysses pissed me off. When Molly Bloom just says, "Yes I said yes I will Yes." And I'm thinking, You should be saying no, Molly. How about no? Saying no is great.Collection: Thinking
When I'm choosing things, there's a level of intelligence I want to peel off, whether it's written in terribly simple sentences, whether it's from the point of view of a dog, or a 15-year-old boy.Collection: Dog
I don't have the education of an art historian. I've certainly read about art and look at art and have educated myself to some extent. But I'm not a skilled or thorough art historian and I wouldn't call myself an art critic.Collection: Art
Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.Collection: Europe
Any writer knows that what's left out is as essential, if not more so, than what's there. Unlearning works that way.Collection: Essentials
The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.Collection: Waiting
I unlearned the model of being an editor like Ezra Pound with T.S. Eliot, the unconscious belief that America was the center of the world, and that honesty meant saying what I thought and always being direct.Collection: Honesty
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Writing
A book coming out into the world can be a harsh, harsh time. And your feelings are on the line. Everything that publication is about is really not what your writing is about. Your writing is coming out of something else, and publication and being in the public are something else. And those of us who have published, in whatever way we're published, are very fortunate.Collection: Book
I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all. I'm interested in the ways that I think people want to relate.Collection: Reality
I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: People
I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Memories
People, no matter the economic class, find ways to feed their narcissism.Collection: Class
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.Collection: Class
I'm very interested in animal behavior, and the relationship of human beings to other animal behavior.Collection: Animal
It wasn't that I wanted to be an artist. But when I took my first drawing class with the painter Doug Ohlson, I could never finish a drawing.Collection: Artist
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."Collection: Sick
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Laughing
People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.Collection: People
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.Collection: New York
I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.Collection: Kind
You can think everything is dire, but you act as if there's possibility. I see children coming into the world as an expression of this. Sometimes, not always - it can just be somebody that wasn't on the birth control pill or didn't have access to abortion. But I usually see a wanted child as a sign of optimism, and I like that.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Pregnancy