Lynne Tillman quotes:

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.

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.

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.

I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience.

I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.

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

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.

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."

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

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.

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.

Any writer knows that what's left out is as essential, if not more so, than what's there. Unlearning works that way.

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

Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.

Certainly there will always be stories,

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.

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

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

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 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.

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'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.

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.

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

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.

People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.

People, no matter the economic class, find ways to feed their narcissism.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.