Lynne Tillman famous quotes

03-26-2025

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Pepsi #Ancestor
Certainly there will always be stories,
-- Lynne Tillman

#Stories
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.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Art #Lying #Responsibility
I'm the author of my own misery.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Misery
Boring people don't know they're boring. That's the problem with boring people.
-- Lynne Tillman

#People #Problem #Boring
I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Thinking #People #Humans
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.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Tired #People #Desire
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

#Beautiful #Thinking #Trying
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.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Dark #Thinking #Laughing
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.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Thinking #Kind #Bothered
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

#Jobs #Character #Winning
It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Reader #Determine
Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Regret #Forget #Obvious
Without curiosity a writer is dead.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Curiosity
Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Fun #Writing #Giving
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.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Believe #Thinking #Laughing
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

#People #Laughing #Remember
I don't believe a picture is worth a thousand words, unless they're very confusing words.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Believe #Confusing
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.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Writing #Thinking #Political
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.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Teaching #Mean #Thinking
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

#Beautiful #Writing #Thinking
I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.
-- Lynne Tillman

#World #Miserable
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.
-- Lynne Tillman

#Thinking #Ulysses
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

#People #Use #Determine

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