Tao Lin Quotes
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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.
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If I focused hard on getting a literary agent, and doing things like that, instead of designing my blog's header, I would have more money, I think. 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.
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Patriotism is the belief that not all human lives are worth the same.
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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.
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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.
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Regarding drugs: just the existence of drugs seems troubling to me.
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The correct arrangement of words will make these bad feelings go away tonight.
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I think mostly the commodifying comes after I've done something that has some other value to me.
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I don't think anything ever "needs" to happen. I don't think it's more positive to have a Twitter account, a Tumblr, and a blog. Someone without those things will use their time to do other things, like read books or swim or talk to their children or read websites or listen to music or write books or lie in bed or sit in a chair. I don't think any of these things are more positive than any other things.
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I don't know what Douglas Coupland thinks about his writing. I've read maybe one page of one of his books and didn't think I was similar to him. But it seems like people just compare you to anyone, pretty much.
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Life has never died, which is something that I think people ignore.
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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 ?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One seemed simply to be here, less an accumulation of moments than a single arrangement continuously gifted from some inaccessible future.
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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.
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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
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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.
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But there was nothing I could do with the emotion really. It just went away after a while.
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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.
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My publisher had mailed [Bret Easton Ellis] Richard Yates. And when I talked to him he said he had read all my prose books. And he said something like, "You got a lot of mileage out of Dakota Fanning."
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I wouldn't think of my characters' moralities at all. And I think I identify fully with every main character I've written about and would say that I am them pretty much. So in terms of that I don't think I'm similar to Bret Easton Ellis .
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It seems like for the last 10 years, I've just been investing in the future.
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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.
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note the similarities with buddhism a buddhist who has achieved nirvana is not sad primarily because it does not know the concept of sad [...]
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A world without right or wrong was a world that did not want itself, anything other than itself, or anything not those two things, but that still wanted something. A world without right or wrong invited you over, complained about you, and gave you cookies. Don't leave, it said, and gave you a vegan cookie. It avoided eye contact, but touched your knee sometimes. It was the world without right or wrong. It didn't have any meaning. It just wanted a little meaning.
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When I'm talking to someone I think 'can I use this dialogue in a book,'" said Luis. "If the answer is no I try talking to someone else.
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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.
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Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake.
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