A Quote by Lynne Tillman

Any writer knows that what's left out is as essential, if not more so, than what's there. Unlearning works that way.

Lynne Tillman

Quote Topics

Any Essential Knows Left Left Out More Out Than Way Works Writer

Quote Author

Lynne Tillman
Novelist
Born: 1947

The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.

Joy Williams

David Fincher is probably the best comprehensive director in terms of being a manger of a process that must drive forward. He has such confident command of cinema language and visual language and script and performance. He knows more about f-stops than any cameraman, he knows more about lighting than any gaffer, he is a wonderful writer, and he can give you a good line reading. Under pressure, he is the kind of guy who you will just dive in with and trust and follow because his vision is so intense.

Edward Norton

I'm a firm believer that everything in life works out the way it's supposed to. And who knows? I figure I've got a few years left (in the NHL) and maybe I can come back in the end.

Darren McCarty

That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.

Jonathan Dee

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

John Updike

I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.

Robert Benchley

It turns out the businessman knows more about how the economy really works than the chattering class. What a shock.

Stephen Moore

It feels as though a very disproportionate number of main characters are writers, because that's what the writer knows. Fair enough. But nothing bothers me more in a movie than an actor playing a writer, and you just know he's not a writer. Writers recognize other writers. Ethan Hawke is too hot to be a writer.

B. J. Novak

Science may be weird and incomprehensible--more weird and less comprehensible than any theology--but science works. It gets results. It can fly you to Saturn, slingshotting you around Venus and Jupiter on the way. We may not understand quantum theory (heaven knows, I don't), but a theory that predicts the real world to ten decimal places cannot in any straightforward sense be wrong.

Richard Dawkins

I often get asked how I write so much. As any writer knows, the answer is to write a lot more than you actually publish.

Brad Feld

I can write any kind of novel I want, any time, and sell it, but there's not that many people watching it. Even a low-rated TV show is a couple million more people than read my books. You want to be read, in essence. If you're a television writer, you're a writer and you want people to read your stuff. You're still reaching a bigger audience, that way. That's a philosophical way to look at it.

George Pelecanos

Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yourself left at all?

Patrick Ness

Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don't expect to go.

Madeleine L'Engle

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Stephen King

Anyone who has raised more than one child knows full well that kids turn out the way they turn out - astonishingly, for the most part, and usually quite unlike their siblings, even their twins, raised under the same flawed rooftree. Little we have done or said, or left undone and unsaid, seems to have made much mark. It's hubris to suppose ourselves so influential; a casual remark on the playground is as likely to change their lives as any dedicated campaign of ours. They come with much of their own software already in place, waiting, and none of the keys we press will override it.