Top 86 Quotes & Sayings by Tao Lin
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Tao Lin.
Last updated on December 24, 2024.
If I were really rich, I would be flying places, I think.
My face always looks bored or depressed. It's not an accurate impression.
I'm not being secretive about anything. I just actually don't have opinions about society.
I don't have a definition for depression. I'm productive, and that's not a sign of depression, right? And I don't have weeks where I don't leave my bed. It seems like depressed people have those.
I think I've written about family and things in 'Taipei' which could be considered Asian culture.
If I don't like someone and I start reading their stuff, it seems like my brain will just automatically start criticizing everything that's there. It's really hard to read a book without having all this outside information telling you what to think about it.
The idea of 'advice,' in terms of telling people advice or asking people for advice, has become not comprehensible to me, to a certain degree, due to feeling, like, for something to be accurately defined as 'good' or 'bad,' I would want to know the context, goal, perspective for it.
I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'
I don't have specific music for when I'm writing. I'm usually listening to the same playlist or 'artist' before I arrive at the computer as when I'm walking somewhere after leaving the computer.
I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.'
I don't think music affects what words I choose to type in what order, within what punctuation, at this point, because I'm rereading and editing each sentence, at this point, in my published books, probably 100-150 times each, on average, and listening to probably 20-60 different songs in that time.
I feel 'proud' whenever I feel that I've worked on something for a certain amount of time with a certain amount of attention. I'm not sure if I think in terms of 'pride' though.
I listen to music almost any time I'm not sleeping, 'hanging out' with specific people, or showering.
I like most any place if I have Internet access.
I like part-time jobs in restaurants.
I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.
I don't think I understand the concept of regret. Because if I regret anything, that would mean, like, I hate myself.
My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
A lot of people think I'm a vegan. I'm not.
I can discern that certain things have an effect on certain other things, but I don't view those effects as good or bad. If a context and a goal is defined, I could say if it's good or bad. But overall, I don't view things as good or bad.
I'm a shy, nervous person, and I don't like teaching with "terms." I didn't teach them, like, "This is first person, this is second person, this is foreshadowing," or whatever, so no one probably felt like they were learning anything. But I feel like teaching in that way reduces the concept to a term.
It seems like most people will agree that they would like if they were treated by other people based on what they have concretely done in their life, not what other people have done, with their lives.
I cried when my ex-girlfriend sent me a text message saying how much she liked my present to her.
I think I don't view myself as an author. I view myself as a person. I view anything as part of being a person, so I feel okay with "marketing" or other things like that.
Focusing on being a person instead of an Asian or an [anything] seems to promote a worldview that encourages people to treat others based on what each person has specifically done in their life, which seems like it would reduce such things as war, racism, unfairness, "hate crimes," [other things most people feel aversion toward].
Regarding drugs: just the existence of drugs seems troubling to me.
I just keep investing in the future, and I haven't reached the point where I'm not doing that.
As a child, she’d always had what she imagined were fascinating thoughts, but didn’t ever say them. Once, as a little girl, at recess, she thought that if she ran very fast at a pole and then caught it and swung quickly around, part of her would keep going, and she would become two girls.
Though if love was an animal, Garret knew, it would probably be the Loch Ness Monster. If it didn’t exist, that didn’t matter. People made models of it, put it in the water, and took photos. The hoax of it was good enough. The idea of it. Though some people feared it, wished it would just go away, had their lives insured against being eaten alive by it.
Do you sometimes look up from the computer and look around the room and know you are alone, I mean really know it, then feel scared ?
Death is the end of the fear of death. [...] To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.
I know,' said Erin, and described how she'd lately felt depressed in a new and scary way, which Paul also had felt lately and described as a sadness-based fear, immune to tone and interpretation, as if not meant for humans - more visceral than sadness, but unlike fear because it decreased heart rate and impaired the senses, causing everything to seem 'darker.
sad things are beautiful only from a distance therefore you just want to get away from them from a distance of one hundred and thirty years ....i'm going to distance myself until the world is beautiful
I think everyone is "racist," to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at, but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.
I was delivering pizzas at Domino's. I was 17 maybe. I liked it a lot. Just driving in the nice weather and listening to music.
I feel connected with people because of their sense of humor, worldview, and what they think and feel about certain existential issues (things not affected, in my view, by if someone rides a horse or drives a car or talks only IRL or only by typing), not how old they are, what they use to convey what they think and feel about certain existential issues, or if we have both watched the same TV shows or looked at the same websites.
I actually don't have...opinions. I'm not being secretive about anything. I just actually don't have opinions about society. I can discern that certain things have an effect on certain other things but I don't view those effects as good or bad.
Most people will agree that they would like if they were treated by other people based on what they have concretely done in their life, not what other people have done, with their lives. Focusing on being a person instead of an Asian or an anything seems to promote a worldview that encourages people to treat others based on what each person has specifically done in their life, which seems like it would reduce such things as war, racism, unfairness, "hate crimes".
Sometimes an alien would stand with a moose, not because of solidarity, but because of accidentally doing it.
If you're, like, a PhD student in English, and you look at each instance that Richard Yates is mentioned in the book...it has sort of it's own narrative that one could analyze and write literary criticism about.
If a context and a goal is defined I could say if it's good or bad. But overall I don't view things as good or bad. So I'm like a robot or computer in that sense. So maybe that's why people don't think they know me when they read my writing.
I usually have Kafka biography in my bathroom. It's a book I can open at random and feel interested in immediately. It's really funny. With this book, since I'm opening it at random and immediately interested, I don't feel the need to read more than I want to read, in that there's not, like, a plot that leads me along. So I can stop whenever.
does a society exist where it's become acceptable to wear 'helmets' enclosing one's entire head when in public to preempt social interaction
I can feel the universe expanding and making things be further apart.
It seems like for the last 10 years, I've just been investing in the future.
I think Gmail chats are different than IRL conversations because Gmail chats are saved by Gmail exactly as they occurred. I like texts and emails. Seems like I don't have anything to say that isn't obvious about texts, emails, and Gmail chats.
You were one person alive and your brain was encased in a skull. There were other people out there. It took effort to be connected.
Lately, they were always reassuring each other that nothing was wrong; and probably it was true—life wasn’t supposed to be incredible, after all. Life wasn’t some incredible movie. Life was all the movies, ever, happening at once. There were good ones, bad ones, some went straight to video.
I like Bret Easton Ellis' sense of humor. I feel like mine is sometimes similar to his. And how his characters sometimes seem really confused in a humorous manner. I like that. And I have that sometimes in my characters.
I don't feel a connection with younger people or with Generation X, or any generation, I feel. If I felt a connection with people my age I wouldn't have written six books about feeling depressed, alienated, lonely. If I did I would have many friends and feel connected with them and probably be a happy person who has a real job.
I don't know how to incorporate regret. But I'll say, like, "It affected me that way," "I learned this," "Next time maybe I'll do it differently".
Life has never died, which is something that I think people ignore.
Novels–and memoirs–are perhaps the most comprehensive reports humans can deliver, of their private experiences, to other humans. In these terms there is only one kind of novel: a human attempt to transfer or convey some part or version of their world of noumenon to another’s world of noumenon.
I like reading books where people with a lot of money use it to do whatever they want. Like stay in expensive hotels and do whatever drugs they want and fly wherever they want.
Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake.
I don't know what to say about Asians. I think everyone is "racist," to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at (for example skin color, bone structure), but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.
It seems like I'm not [happy]. Because if you look at my tweets and what I think and say, it seems like I'm worried about what's going to happen.
Patriotism is the belief that not all human lives are worth the same.
I just don't feel good if I'm repeating myself.
I think mostly the commodifying comes after I've done something that has some other value to me.
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