Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.

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

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.

[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.

The right to pursue happiness sends me and other Americans, even here where we are meant to resist outside temptation, on a hunt for it. If I'm not hungry, I might seek other forms of happiness, or pleasure, which is part of my American birthright, though the most misconceived notion of them or the most difficult to realize; I can pursue several means and ways to be happy, if I am able to forget what makes me habitually sad.

How many performance artists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? I don't know. I left early.

I like to believe I enjoy surprises, that I'm someone to whom an eruption of the unusual should be usual, or who branches out to advance the implausible. I might fly a jet, become a man, walk backward without a care, threaten like a stalker, speak freely at all times, swim the Atlantic on a greasy back, be silent for months like a Carthusian ...

Once history holds your hand, it never lets go. But it has an anxious grip and takes you places you couldn't expect.

Reality disappoints regularly. When people are supposed to have fun, it's likely they won't, because fun can't live up to its image. Does anything live up to its image?

I choose the irrational from a rational position. I'm positioning myself on Undo, undo even undoing. Un-think, because routines dull the mind, and you don't see what's in front of you. Familiarity breeds contempt, and also lack of in-sight and out-sight.

Faced with the unfamiliar, we the public have been trained to rely on museums, like schools, to serve up art and culture like pieces of pie: little wedges of esthetics, criticism, politics and history.

Elizabeth liked commercials. They were anti-death. You had to be alive to buy things.

I once heard that the French don't prosecute people who commit crimes of passion twenty minutes after waking.

It's almost a mission for some people - to forget.

The desire to catch, as Bonnard hoped, the PASSING MOMENT is antithetical to being in the moment. The photographer is an observer to others' moments. The Picture People have dedicated themselves to this paradox, and consign themselves on either side of the equation.

Before 1802, cirrus, cumulus, and altostratus clouds hadn't been given names. Untitled before 1802, the shapes were present in the sky, ethereal or ephemeral, presumably since the big bang, but un-designated, until they needed to be. Why then? The world hasn't been fully seen, until it is named.

The television was on. It had been on for hours. Years. It was there. TV on demand, a great freedom. Hadn't Burroughs said there was more freedom today than ever before. Wasn't that like saying things were more like today than they've ever been.

We do not select the stories we write, we do not pick the voices. They take us by surprise and we surrender to them. They write us, they write in us, all over us, through us. They occupy us. We are, in a sense, puppets--to language, with language.

Estranged mountains bulged under the sky, the big sky, the endless sky. Anyway, no one could see an end to it, which reassured her, since so much seemed to be coming to an end. It felt that way. But it seemed impossible---the universe dropping off, ending, there would be an end, and then there would be nothing, a no more, a vacuum of no more. Her imagination couldn't let her go there.