Tao Lin Quotes

It sometimes seemed to him that for love to work, it had to be fair, that he should tell only half the joke, and she the other half. Otherwise, it would not be love, but something completely else–pity or entertainment, or stand-up comedy.

note the similarities with buddhism a buddhist who has achieved nirvana is not sad primarily because it does not know the concept of sad [...]

The distracting feeling of disbelief when you're finally doing something you've procrastinated on for notable amounts of time.

I think Bret Easton Ellis has said that he doesn't completely identify with his characters. And I think he has referred to them as immoral before.

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

I just don't feel good if I'm repeating myself.

I cried when my ex-girlfriend sent me a text message saying how much she liked my present to her.

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.

Moose had no friends that year. A lot of the time a moose would feel tired and lean against other moose. Only there wouldn't be moose there and the moose would fall.

Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake.

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.

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.

One seemed simply to be here, less an accumulation of moments than a single arrangement continuously gifted from some inaccessible future.

I think mostly the commodifying comes after I've done something that has some other value to me.

While other rich people might be like, "Once I'm rich I'm going to go on a vacation to wherever," but instead they just keep wanting to be more rich. It just seems like it would be fun to do whatever you wanted. If I were really rich I would be flying places, I think.

I don't know what to say about Asians. I think everyone is "racist," to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at (for example skin color, bone structure), but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.

I can feel the universe expanding and making things be further apart.

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

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 ?

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.

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.

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.

does a society exist where it's become acceptable to wear 'helmets' enclosing one's entire head when in public to preempt social interaction

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.

He sometimes felt that life was something that had already risen, and all of this, the Jackson Pollack of spring, summer, and fall, the vague refrigeration and tinfoiled sky of wintertime, was just a falling, really, originward, in a kind of correction, as if by spritual gravity, towards the wiser consciousness--or consciousnessless, maybe; could gravity trick itself like that?--of death. It was a kind of movement both very slow and very fast; there was both too much and not enough time to think.

Though if love was an animal, Garret knew, it would probably be the Loch Ness Monster. If it didn’t exist, that didn’t matter. People made models of it, put it in the water, and took photos. The hoax of it was good enough. The idea of it. Though some people feared it, wished it would just go away, had their lives insured against being eaten alive by it.

I think Gmail chats are different than IRL conversations because Gmail chats are saved by Gmail exactly as they occurred. I like texts and emails. Seems like I don't have anything to say that isn't obvious about texts, emails, and Gmail chats.

Sometimes an alien would stand with a moose, not because of solidarity, but because of accidentally doing it.

On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.

If I wrote about "being [abstraction]" I would be ignoring existential issues (such as death, limited-time, the arbitrary nature of the universe, the mystery of consciousness) that I feel affect me most in my life and think about most of the time. Another reason is that it doesn't seem specific or accurate, to me, to write about "being [abstraction]." I think there are some other reasons.

I think everyone is "racist," to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at, but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.

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.

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.

Life has never died, which is something that I think people ignore.

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.

It seems like for the last 10 years, I've just been investing in the future.

We have been sitting here all night bullshitting and we still don’t know what to do.

I feel connected with people because of their sense of humor, worldview, and what they think and feel about certain existential issues (things not affected, in my view, by if someone rides a horse or drives a car or talks only IRL or only by typing), not how old they are, what they use to convey what they think and feel about certain existential issues, or if we have both watched the same TV shows or looked at the same websites.

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.

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."

It seems like most people will agree that they would like if they were treated by other people based on what they have concretely done in their life, not what other people have done, with their lives.

Regarding drugs: just the existence of drugs seems troubling to me.

The correct arrangement of words will make these bad feelings go away tonight.

Patriotism is the belief that not all human lives are worth the same.

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 .

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.

I know,' said Erin, and described how she'd lately felt depressed in a new and scary way, which Paul also had felt lately and described as a sadness-based fear, immune to tone and interpretation, as if not meant for humans - more visceral than sadness, but unlike fear because it decreased heart rate and impaired the senses, causing everything to seem 'darker.

Focusing on being a person instead of an Asian or an [anything] seems to promote a worldview that encourages people to treat others based on what each person has specifically done in their life, which seems like it would reduce such things as war, racism, unfairness, "hate crimes," [other things most people feel aversion toward].