J. Tillman Quotes

Somewhere inside, we hear a voice. It leads us in the direction of the person we wish to become. But it is up to us whether or not to follow.

The truth is not what we received today. Once again, we are being used as props in a Pentagon public relations exercise.

God forgives man the time spent looking at airplane photos.

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

To err on the side of passion is human and right and the only way I'll live.

And I really haven't done a damn thing.

Life Will Never Be The Same Because There Had Never Been Anyone Like You...Ever in the World.

Heaven blew every trumpet and played every horn on the wonderful, marvelous night you were born.

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

The saying "Getting there is half the fun" became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines.

Oregano is the spice of life.

You are the one and only ever you.

You won't rise to the occasion - you'll default to your level of training.

I hate to lose. And when I do lose, I don't lose the lesson, I don't miss the message.

Boring people don't know they're boring. That's the problem with boring people.

Defense is on the fly, it's reactive; you have to react to the offense. I have to prevent someone from doing something when they want to do it.

I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence.

If my peers had a significant impact on my music, my music would probably be a lot more popular.

Love is just an institution.

My humor is my creativity, and my skepticism is a gift.

I like to compete. I think competition brings out the best in anybody.

The mind is a powerful tool.

I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.

You can't really do anything creative without a source of inspiration.

Funny is a good foil. Humor is illuminating, and it also gives you power.

There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.

It wasn't that I wanted to be an artist. But when I took my first drawing class with the painter Doug Ohlson, I could never finish a drawing.

As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.

I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.

You learn to read in kindergarten or first grade, and suddenly there's this other world that isn't your family or your school or your friends. It's something else.

Reading gave me great comfort and pleasure. When I started being able to write, around seven or eight, I wanted to be able to do that myself, to create that other world.

Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.

Now that I am conscious of the world of chronic pain, when I see somebody walking down the street who's having trouble, I feel a sadness for them. I notice.

I do think we think repetitively. It's so hard to get certain thoughts out of your head. If you're angry at a friend, you're going to keep going back to that conversation.

People, no matter the economic class, find ways to feed their narcissism.

People in the upper classes can just as easily be indifferent to their own body, or treat themselves as badly, as people who don't have the money. There are always differences among differences.

I'm very interested in animal behavior, and the relationship of human beings to other animal behavior.

I don't think that just because a lot of my music has a quieter aesthetic; [it] excludes me from achieving that in a live setting, from being dangerous or something.

[Reality] isn't simply the so-called world that you're in. Your reality is a much larger one that takes in all matter of identification and desires and hopes.

The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.

I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all. I'm interested in the ways that I think people want to relate.

I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.

Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that.

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

I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all.

Conversation on the page should reflect what the story is about. It doesn't have to be "realistic" in the sense that it's something you heard and plugged into a story.

People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.

I still do believe that form and content are very much related. I think throwing away some of the rule books on that is a good thing.

I definitely think moving around helped shape me and has helped me be a better player.

It's all there-the boredom, the devotion, the horror and even the humor in an industrial war fought on a global scale that we'll never see again. Unit histories just do not get any better.