Lydia Millet Quotes

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Lydia Millet

Profession : Novelist

Birth : December 5, 1968

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

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 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

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

Lydia Millet

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

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

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

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

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

Lydia Millet

People who are obsessed amuse me.

Lydia Millet

I don't write the same book twice.

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

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

Lydia Millet

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

Lydia Millet

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

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

Lydia Millet

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

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

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

Lydia Millet