Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Lydia Millet

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Lydia Millet.

Last updated on December 23, 2024.

Lydia Millet is an American novelist. Her most recent novel, A Children's Bible, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction and named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Salon wrote of Millet's work, "The writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself."

American - Novelist | Born: December 5, 1968

Source: Wikipedia

I wanted to go into the tropics and save animals - and write, of course.

Lydia Millet

'Dept. of Speculation' contains numerous enviable lines.

Lydia Millet

My motto is, if you love something, don't set it free. No matter how hard it struggles. That would be stupid.

Lydia Millet

I don't tend to picture my characters as actors and actresses.

Lydia Millet

Work-wise, I try not to repeat myself too often. And I have to love whatever I'm doing.

Lydia Millet

In Hiroshima, bombed Aug. 6, 1945, no warning was given of the air attack, and thus no escape was possible for the mostly women, children and old people who fell victim.

Lydia Millet

If Oak Flat were a Christian holy site or, for that matter, Jewish or Muslim, no senator who wished to remain in office would dare to sneak a backdoor deal for its destruction into a spending bill - no matter what mining-company profits or jobs might result. But this is Indian religion.

Lydia Millet

If you're doing creative work, that work should never feel trivial - even if what you're doing is for hire or lightly intended. Even the mundane doesn't have to be trivial.

Lydia Millet

People from the rest of the state tend to hate Phoenix, with that typical resentment of the boroughs and the towns for the big city.

Lydia Millet

Most of my books have something to do with L.A.

Lydia Millet

One man's holy is another woman's sublime.

Lydia Millet

The comic novels I did when I was in my 20s had a harder edge - less sympathy for people. Or a sympathy that was harder to detect: Characters' foibles and obsessive bents were unrelenting, like caricatures.

Lydia Millet

I've seen a few wild grizzly bears, mostly in Alaska and British Columbia, and always from a distance. But each grizzly I've caught sight of was as fearsome and sublime as the last. You never get used to their raw power and massive bodies, or the mysterious intelligence in their dark, close-set eyes.

Lydia Millet

It's a friendly act to write a lighthearted book.

Lydia Millet

I've always wondered: is there really any access to the White House?

Lydia Millet

What makes 'The Lorax' such a powerful fable is partly its shamelessness. It pulls no punches; it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve.

Lydia Millet

The grizzly bears that live in and around Yellowstone make up almost half the population in the lower 48 states, and now those bears are at risk.

Lydia Millet

L.A., for me, is a perfect microcosm of America - because it's so profligate, and so glamorous, and so anti-intellectual, finally.

Lydia Millet

The Free Body Culture gave me a gift I might never have received had I refused to play along. It left me with an acute sense of the absurd - one I still cherish - to be there among my fellow apes, awkward and less than half-willing, aiming and missing, leaping, landing and wincing.

Lydia Millet

Both climate change and extinction are results of our tyranny over the nonhuman world and our domination of, and exploitation of, whole categories of each other - and those, in turn, are clearly linked to agriculture, the cattle-industrial complex, capitalism.

Lydia Millet

Domestic realism has dominated the American marketplace for decades now. It leeches into literary fiction, and I don't think it's that rich a vein.

Lydia Millet

At 16, I was more resilient and easygoing than I am now.

Lydia Millet

For almost two centuries, American gray wolves, vilified in fact as well as fiction, were the victims of vicious government extermination programs. By the time the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, only a few hundred of these once-great predators were left in the lower 48 states.

Lydia Millet

I worry about the very pernicious way we elevate and separate ourselves from other beasts, the way we rationalize our comfort and ease, our worship of the self, as healthy. It's enticing, but with a terrible taint of evil.

Lydia Millet

Most climate debates have focused on cutting the use of fossil fuels. But besides a few high-profile scuffles over fuel extraction in vulnerable wild places like the offshore Arctic, political leaders have ignored fossil fuel production as a necessary piece of climate strategy.

Lydia Millet

When 'Watchmen' was published in 1986, the vast majority of comics readers deemed it a watershed in comics history. The 12-part serial comic book was widely acclaimed as a genius subversion of the superhero genre, and it did much to popularize comics to adults.

Lydia Millet

No one bought my screenplays.

Lydia Millet

Shouldn't the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature?

Lydia Millet

We were a Seuss family. As a child, I read almost all of his books, but the one I loved best was 'The Lorax.'

Lydia Millet

When I was 16, I went to Berlin - West Berlin, since at that time a wall still divided the city - to live for three months with a family on an exchange program.

Lydia Millet

Fiction should be an ethically safe space, free of fancy ideas. It should be dedicated modestly to relationships or escapism or the needs of luscious voyeurs.

Lydia Millet

On climate change, we have only a handful of years to make massive changes, according to the scientists. The politicians have to act, and only the people can make them, because Royal Dutch Shell's not going to do it.

Lydia Millet

I've always been interested in obsessive, insane people.

Lydia Millet

I don't like names that are clever or made-up sounding.

Lydia Millet

I think that young readers have very strong stomachs.

Lydia Millet

There is a lot of contradictions of mermaids as a symbol. I'm always interested in contradictions.

Lydia Millet

You're lucky if people like your book, and the more people that like it, the luckier I feel.

Lydia Millet

If you're going to do a thing, do it fully so that no writing you give the world misrepresents you - so that nothing you put out there is like a sad regift you couldn't throw away and had to find a place for.

Lydia Millet

I don't write the same book twice.

Lydia Millet

I advise, if you're stymied by a passage or paragraph or plot point - whether it's for an assignment from the outside world or one that comes only from within - get up from wherever you're sitting, walk outdoors, and do nothing but look at the sky for five minutes. Just stare at that thing. Then execute a small bow and go back in.

Lydia Millet

Marriage is like the romantic ideal, and yet the trappings around it and the culture about it are really the opposite of that.

Lydia Millet

I came to understand that a German nudist, in 1984, loved little more than to work on his or her tan.

Lydia Millet

I wanted to write about this tropical honeymoon in part because I had the most drastically terrible honeymoon.

Lydia Millet

Oil drilling and coal mining are killing endangered wildlife, polluting rivers, creating smog over wilderness areas and blocking wildlife corridors in America's most treasured landscapes.

Lydia Millet

Wyoming, home to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons, is also the country's largest coal producer and one of its largest gas drillers. Two-thirds of the state's gas-drilling rigs are on public lands in the increasingly industrialized Greater Green River Basin.

Lydia Millet

You need not fear my extinction. Fear my proliferation! I've already reproduced!

Lydia Millet

Names and other proper nouns shouldn't distract from the language.

Lydia Millet

I never seem to leave L.A., though I left L.A.

Lydia Millet

As soon as a regular guy like Bill Clinton becomes the president, he wears a mantle of greatness. He's the president.

Lydia Millet

Historically, grizzlies ranged from Alaska to Mexico, with at least 50,000 bears living in the western half of the contiguous United States. With European colonization, the bears were shot, poisoned, and trapped to the brink of extinction.

Lydia Millet

I like to amuse myself.

Lydia Millet

In 1805, the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, making their way across the West, were warned by American Indian tribes of grizzly bears' awesome strength.

Lydia Millet

I'm for any woman who loves sloths.

Lydia Millet

I'm not calculating enough in the way I approach writing.

Lydia Millet

Everyone desires to laugh sometimes, and I want to make that available.

Lydia Millet

It seems to me that the time for subtlety in our American life has passed.

Lydia Millet

The Safari Club International has worked the legal system hard to try to keep polar bears - threatened primarily by climate change, but also by hunting - on the list of creatures people can import as trophies after shooting.

Lydia Millet

There has to be space for play in literature. We all need some breathing room.

Lydia Millet

If I can't find a way to love it, I let it go. Kind of the opposite of the popular homily.

Lydia Millet

People who are obsessed amuse me.

Lydia Millet