Lynne Tillman Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 ...

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

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.

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

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.

She thought: my work cannot protect me. I will be true to my fantasies, even when I don't recognize them. What I make is not entirely in my power, as conscious as I try to be. It's always in my hands and out of my hands, too. I like to look at things, because they make me feel good, even when they make me feel bad. I'm proud to be melancholic. I like to make things, because they usually make me feel good. I am not satisfied with the world, so I add to it. My desires are on display. What I make I love and hate.

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.

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.

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.

Travel unsettles the appropriate. You’re bound to be inappropriate. Which is probably why I don’t feel the intense embarrassment some do at not being able to speak foreign languages correctly. It seems to me that one of the privileges of travel is never to fit in. And not to fit in, not to be able to, is a kind of freedom. One of the freedoms that money can buy, like buying a hotel room in which one is psychologically unburdened and can act out guilty pleasures, capitalist ones, no doubt.

Sometimes I think it’s my fate to meet more and more people and that if it weren’t, my life would be less chaotic. Virginia Woolf wrote that books continue each other and it seems to me that people continue each other too, spring ungodlike out of the heads and bodies of others, not clones but continuities, with ties that bind, loosely or closely. Some characters seem to fit better in some scenes than in others, have more to do with the space around them and the actors who preceded their appearance. Of course then there are the discontinuities…

Compared with Europeans most of us don’t walk around bearing history’s daily weight, even though we’re weight-conscious. We don’t listen to history’s taunts. Even though they’re there. Old news isn’t supposed to linger in our streets or in our homes. We even have less of it, I’d things like history can be weighed and measured that may. Europeans may be size queens. If I defend myself, do I defend my country, as if it and I were the same, which begs the question of how and to what extent these things can be separated. Do I claim the country or does it claim me?"

After my father died, I couldn’t stop crying. I wore a shirt of his to sleep in for over a month. I went into a mourning that hasn’t entirely ended. Long after my father died, I felt he, something of him, was lodged slightly above my heart. It was a physical sensation. Sometimes in an old-style southern Italian restaurant, like Lanza’s in the East Village, I would order veal parmigiana because he loved it. I would imagine him eating it, tasting it, I could see his face then as he chewed with delight, and felt I was tasting it for and with him. Swallowing was hard.

... 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.

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

…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.

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.

Firecrackers keep popping off and everything feels slightly evil.

I can feel entirely indifferent to the content of what I say. A great postindustrial capitalist ennui engulfs me and sweeps away vestiges of involvement. Leaves me passionless and dissatisfied and incapable of movement. I'm threatened by this constantly. In unfamiliar surroundings, the point is to shift voices. I like shifting voices. Love affairs permit those shifts, and when the lover is shifty, as Zoran might be, the ride is bumpy.

Sometimes he's hopeful. He quotes Gransci: Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. I might easily reverse the tow, I say, hoping that he'll enjoy the irony. He lights a cigar and peers at me as if we were sifting at different tables. "A joke?" he asks. "Sure", I say. Not mentioning paralysis of the will, the division of the intellect. "In Haiti" I tell him "there's a saying: When the anthropologists come, the gods leave". "That is too anti-intellctual for me", Zoran says, "but interesting. Anthropology is anyway a nineteen-century problem." "I can't think of one problem that isn't technological that doesn't go back at least to the nineteenth century." "Touche".

I thought LA would be a softer way to live but I was surprised at its hard edges. “The sunshine is invasive,” my friend Lynne Tillman says of LA. It took me years to grasp the basic physics, that less moisture in the air means the light is refracted less, and thus felt more keenly or—the word that feels most right is sharply.