Translatero.com > Citations > Citations Lynne Tillman

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I'm the author of my own misery.

Misery

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

Humans People 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.

Desire People 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.

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.

Dark Laughing Thinking

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

Ancestor 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.

Bothered Kind 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.

Character Jobs Winning

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.

Art Lying Responsibility

Boring people don't know they're boring. That's the problem with boring people.

Boring People Problem

It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.

Determine Reader

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.

Forget Obvious Regret

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

Fun Giving Writing

Without curiosity a writer is dead.

Curiosity

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.

Laughing People Remember

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.

Believe Laughing Thinking

I don't believe a picture is worth a thousand words, unless they're very confusing words.

Believe Confusing

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.

Different Mean 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.

Political Thinking Writing

Certainly there will always be stories.

Stories