Top 40 Lynne Tillman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No escape from patterns and systems, no exits. Nothing, and no one, resides outside a system; that’s the way it is. Nothing outside the inside, the inside is also outside, etc.”

— Lynne Tillman

2. “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

3. “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.”

— Lynne Tillman

4. “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.”

— Lynne Tillman

5. “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

6. “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.”

— Lynne Tillman

7. “There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn’t mean they’re not fascinating.”

— Lynne Tillman

8. “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

9. “I’m very interested in animal behavior, and the relationship of human beings to other animal behavior.”

— Lynne Tillman

10. “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

11. “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

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

— Lynne Tillman

13. “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

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

— Lynne Tillman

15. “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

16. “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.”

— Lynne Tillman

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

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

— Lynne Tillman

21. “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

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

— Lynne Tillman

23. “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.”

— Lynne Tillman

24. “I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.”

— Lynne Tillman

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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?”

— Lynne Tillman

28. “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.”

— Lynne Tillman

29. “It’s almost a mission for some people – to forget.”

— Lynne Tillman

30. “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

31. “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.”

— Lynne Tillman

32. “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

33. “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.”

— Lynne Tillman

34. “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

35. “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.”

— Lynne Tillman

36. “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.”

— Lynne Tillman

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

— Lynne Tillman

38. “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

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

— Lynne Tillman

40. “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

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

— Lynne Tillman

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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.”

— Lynne Tillman

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

— Lynne Tillman