Quotes from Lynne Tillman

Courage in an artist or writer is different from the courage of firefighters, who rescue people and risk their own lives. Artistic courage might be conceptualized as an internal drama about overcoming rules or inhibitions, dicta of all kinds, the art a manifestation or result of a multitude of processes.

My life felt narrower, and not my own. I gave up some of my life, that's the kind of thought I had, common to us who don't want to do what we feel obliged to do. A sacrifice.

the tongue, for instance, is privileged with information indifferent to words.

I want things plain. Or direct. When I read a book I'm suspicious of description. Too much embellishment or an excess of adjectives bothers me, as if the speaker or writer were attempting to overcome me, to finesse me like a bridge player. Or to seduce me.

but place is unimportant to a traveler, if that's what I can be called. If it were important, people couldn't bear to move on.

The rain persists, an amniotic fluid, the perfect environment for reading in a room, a womb of one's own.

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.