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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Lydia Millet Quotes

I’m not calculating enough in the way I approach writing.

– Lydia Millet

Names and other proper nouns shouldn’t distract from the language.

– Lydia Millet

Indeed, the hype around ‘Watchmen’ is its curse. If you want to enjoy the comic for what it is, ignore the attributions of literariness and the novelistic pretensions with which some critics have imbued it. This isn’t high culture, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s good, juicy pulp fiction with a little nuclear apocalypse thrown in.

– Lydia Millet

No one bought my screenplays.

– Lydia Millet

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

– Lydia Millet

In 1805, the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, making their way across the West, were warned by American Indian tribes of grizzly bears’ awesome strength.

– Lydia Millet

Domestic realism has dominated the American marketplace for decades now. It leeches into literary fiction, and I don’t think it’s that rich a vein.

– Lydia Millet

If Oak Flat were a Christian holy site or, for that matter, Jewish or Muslim, no senator who wished to remain in office would dare to sneak a backdoor deal for its destruction into a spending bill – no matter what mining-company profits or jobs might result. But this is Indian religion.

– Lydia Millet

In Nagasaki, American planes did drop warning leaflets – but not till Aug. 10, a day after the city was bombed.

– Lydia Millet

Without elephants, Africa’s landscape would be unrecognizable, yet these animals have fallen by the hundreds of thousands as a result of two enormous waves of poaching in this century – one in the 1970s and 1980s, the other, beginning around 2009, now underway.

– Lydia Millet

I have a king bed, one of those memory-foam mattresses that doesn’t jiggle as you get in or out. Even if you cleaved it down the middle with a pickax, the thing wouldn’t tremble. It’s practically earthquake-proof.

– Lydia Millet

Within the macho-melodrama tropes of the superhero genre, it’s fair to say ‘Watchmen’ stands out for its rich entertainment, its darkness, and its lurid pleasures. Its vividly drawn panels, moody colors and lush imagery make its popularity well-deserved, if disproportionate.

– Lydia Millet

We were a Seuss family. As a child, I read almost all of his books, but the one I loved best was ‘The Lorax.’

– Lydia Millet

I had hoped that going to Hiroshima would reveal something small, gritty, and precise to countervail the epic quality of historical accounts.

– Lydia Millet

On climate change, we have only a handful of years to make massive changes, according to the scientists. The politicians have to act, and only the people can make them, because Royal Dutch Shell’s not going to do it.

– Lydia Millet

‘Dept. of Speculation’ contains numerous enviable lines.

– Lydia Millet

I think the best fiction is a form of psychological suspense, even though I don’t really write in that idiom.

– Lydia Millet

At 16, I was more resilient and easygoing than I am now.

– Lydia Millet

What makes ‘The Lorax’ such a powerful fable is partly its shamelessness. It pulls no punches; it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve.

– Lydia Millet

The summer after I got divorced, my children asked to sleep in my bed again. It would be the first time we’d shared a bed since they were infants.

– 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 don’t like names that are clever or made-up sounding.

– Lydia Millet

At writing workshops, they taught us to show, not tell – well, showing takes time.

– Lydia Millet

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

– Lydia Millet

Historically, grizzlies ranged from Alaska to Mexico, with at least 50,000 bears living in the western half of the contiguous United States. With European colonization, the bears were shot, poisoned, and trapped to the brink of extinction.

– 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

I don’t write the same book twice.

– Lydia Millet

We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don’t get to the point, and sometimes when we do, our readers don’t notice, in fact. It’s so couched in nuance, it can fly right over a person’s head. ‘What was that you said? I couldn’t quite make it out.’

– 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

Do we seek delicate phraseology in politics or other forms of public life? We do not.

– Lydia Millet

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