J. Tillman Quotes

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 think that providing obstructions in the live setting is when you get something that actually means something, as opposed to just aping your way through your greatest hits.

I don't feel any obligation to make my intentions for a song accessible to a listener or an audience. I'm not interested in conveying anything to them so much as what's best for me.

I like the freedom of being able to just use the live show as an opportunity to more so deconstruct what's going on in the album than to recreate it.

I'm the author of my own misery.

Look at politics; they're always in competition over an election, who wants to win. It's just who we are, it's what we do.

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.

I think everyone needs competition in life, whether it be myself, you, the President.

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

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

Without curiosity a writer is dead.

I don't believe a picture is worth a thousand words, unless they're very confusing words.

Certainly there will always be stories.

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

Ulysses pissed me off. When Molly Bloom just says, "Yes I said yes I will Yes." And I'm thinking, You should be saying no, Molly. How about no? Saying no is great.

I think the major device for me is that narrator's voice. I'm always trying to find a different kind of form to tell whatever story it is, and I wish that weren't so, because it drives me crazy.

I don't know what a natural thought process is.

Obviously the Internet makes everything easier - you get people's addresses and so on and everything seems much more accessible.

The literary world is more time-traveling than the art world, and novelty is much more important in art than it is in writing.

Wanting to know all kinds of things is perfect for novelists, because novelists are generalists. We're not specialists in anything, except, hopefully, 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.

Kafka wrote the great line: "my education has damaged me in ways I do not even know." And that's always been a signature motto for me.

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.

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

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.

With sad music, or music that's perceived as sad, there's a sense of solidarity that can be really powerful. My songs are all joyful to me.

He was all of those things, of course, but none of those things.