62+ Lynne Tillman Quotes On Education, Innovative And Quirky

Lynne Tillman is an American novelist, short story writer, and art critic. She is the author of five novels, including American Genius, A Comedy and The Complete Madame Realism, as well as several collections of short stories. Tillman's writing is often characterized by its surrealistic and postmodern elements, as well as its exploration of themes such as identity, gender, and power. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Lynne Tillman on leadership, education, life.

Top 10 Lynne Tillman Quotes

1. Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.
2. I'm the author of my own misery.
3. Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that.
4. Obviously the Internet makes everything easier - you get people's addresses and so on and everything seems much more accessible.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Any writer knows that what's left out is as essential, if not more so, than what's there. Unlearning works that way.
9. Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.
10. Kafka wrote the great line: "my education has damaged me in ways I do not even know." And that's always been a signature motto for me.

Lynne Tillman Short Quotes

• I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.
• People, no matter the economic class, find ways to feed their narcissism.
• People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.
• I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience.
• Certainly there will always be stories.
• I don't know what a natural thought process is.
• I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.
• There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.
• I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all.
• I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.

Lynne Tillman Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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. — Lynne Tillman

I think it's very hard to reconcile oneself to the notion that it may not matter what you think if you still want to write. — Lynne Tillman

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. — Lynne Tillman

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

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. — Lynne Tillman

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

The literary world is more time-traveling than the art world, and novelty is much more important in art than it is in writing. — Lynne Tillman

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

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. — Lynne Tillman

The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding. — Lynne Tillman

[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

Reading gave me great comfort and pleasure. When I started being able to write, around seven or eight, I wanted to be able to do that myself, to create that other world. — Lynne Tillman

I also think that the issue of doubt and uncertainty is always a good thing and I question why I believe what I believe. I see things changing all around me and I don't feel devoted to a form. If I'm devoted to anything, I'm devoted to the attempt - the "trying" to do something. — Lynne Tillman

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

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." — Lynne Tillman

As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world. — Lynne Tillman

I am interested in people, and I am interested enough in people that I want to be friends with a lot of people and know about their lives. So I'm not a hermit. I'm also interested in writing about other things. It goes on and on. I sometimes wish that I had a different personality. But then I would write different types of books. — Lynne Tillman

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

You learn to read in kindergarten or first grade, and suddenly there's this other world that isn't your family or your school or your friends. It's something else. — Lynne Tillman

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. — Lynne Tillman

I would never want to write a character who was not thoroughly herself or himself. She's a very specific creature in my mind, and she has her thoughts, which range from skin to American history, philosophy, and the arts. — Lynne Tillman

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. — Lynne Tillman

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

You know how some people are upwardly mobile? I'm sort of downwardly mobile in the publishing world, because of my sales figures and also because of the kind of books I write. Everything really counts on sales. I started out with a bigger press, my first few books. But I've always done some things with independent and small presses and small magazines and I always will. — Lynne Tillman

I write about what I'm thinking about. I write about what is bothering me or what is a political, aesthetic, or ethical issue or something, and then I figure out how to do it. I don't write essays that kind of just sustain one thought. I tend to move around because that's what I like. — Lynne Tillman

I think those women who get themselves to write essays, it's not an easy thing to do because as women, you're not encouraged to think; you're encouraged to feel. This is a broad, broad statement. So I think those women who go out on a limb and publish essays are highly conscious of how they are writing their opinions. — Lynne Tillman

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

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

I'm very interested in animal behavior, and the relationship of human beings to other animal behavior. — Lynne Tillman

Nothing is a matter of age. It's really in the person because you can publish book after book after book and still want that golden apple. And maybe it's the reality principle that has hit me. I believe that a career is very different from writing. My career is a certain kind of career. — Lynne Tillman

I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition. 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. Not beautiful in the sense of "oh it's flowy" but in the sense that it really does what it's supposed to do, it what I want it to say. — Lynne Tillman

A friend of mine, a poet, Rebecca Wolff recently said to me, "You know, your stories are really voice-driven," and I guess I knew that already, but it's so true that I can't get something going unless I can hear the voice. — Lynne Tillman

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

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. — Lynne Tillman

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

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

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

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

I think there's much more privileging of the new in art. I think people want to think they privilege the new in writing, but I agree with Virginia Woolf. She wrote a great essay called "Craftsmanship" about how difficult it is to use new words. It's really hard, but you see them coming in because obviously, if you're going to write... I mean, even to write "cell phone" in a novel - it's so boring. — Lynne Tillman

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. I'm not a realist in that way. — Lynne Tillman

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. — Lynne Tillman

Life Lessons by Lynne Tillman

1. Lynne Tillman's work emphasizes the importance of exploring the complexities of identity and the human condition.
2. Her writing encourages readers to think critically about the world around them and to question accepted norms and values.
3. Through her work, Tillman demonstrates the power of literature to challenge and inspire readers to think differently and to find their own voice.