Tao Lin Quotes

There's nothing "wrong" with anything. "Wrong" is a relative term, indicating the opposite of that which you call "right." Yet, what is "right"? Can you be truly objective in these matters? Or are "right" and "wrong" simply descriptions overlaid on events and circumstances by you, out of your decision about them?

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.

I do think they [French] view my writing itself as exotic - though that's probably not the best term for it - to a small extent, mainly because I say things that most French writers would probably hesitate to say for fear of offending someone or upsetting public sensibilities. I don't think that answers the question, but I'm not much good at figuring readers out or I would probably be writing bestsellers.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

An ethic isn't a fact you can look up. It's a way of thinking.

Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.

And it's kind of my own fault too, in the sense that I've used my own life as a literary device so much. I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. I find that most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen.

I don't card out my screenplays ever. I just have an idea I just sit down and write I don't edit. Sometimes the first draft will come out at 200 pages. I think and think and I go, "um this story is about the brother that appears on page 178." I go back and I rewrite.

You have to be very careful to view yourself with a somewhat skeptical eye and to remember that you're not here taking down everything I'm saying because you think I'm such a marvelous fellow but because your editors say go get 1,200 words or whatever on Chuck Heston.

Objectifying your own novel while writing it never really helps. Instead, I guess while you're writing you need to think: This is the novel I want to write. And when you're done you need to think: This is what the novel I wanted to write feels like and reads like and looks like. Other people might call it sweeping or small, but it's the book you chose.

With writing, I think you have to be honest with yourself. I have a certain kind of writing; that is, I like to really embellish the human spirit. You have to write about something you have a feel for.

American views today are weak, confused, and divided. On one side, many progressive liberals still think that we humans are essentially good and getting better and better. On the other side, many postmoderns actually think it is worse to judge evil than to do evil. And in the middle, many ordinary folk plaster life with rainbows and smile buttons and wander through life on the basis of sentiment and clichés.

You have to take away the idea that something you do is right or wrong. I don't think there's a right or a wrong; I think there's an "it works" or "it doesn't work" for the whole. And that's why you need a director you trust, so you can just keep throwing out suggestions.

If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God, say nothing about right or wrong, good or bad. To admit this would force philosophers to confront the possibility that the physical sciences offer a grossly inadequate view of reality. And since philosophers very much wish to think of themselves as scientists, this would offer them an unattractive choice between changing their allegiances or accepting their irrelevance.

Point of view is present in anything I write, but I really try to let the subject and facts speak for themselves.

people in general are totally unable to detach the personality of a writer from the products of his thinking.

All propositions are of equal value.

Yet I have said over and over again that there is no "right" or "wrong" in the universe. A thing is not intrinsically right or wrong. A thing simply is.

Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.

Everything that I think is good is bad, and everything that I think is bad is good.

I try to write books that are different from the books I've already written. I think one of the thing I really try to do is reinvent how a novel can be written.

I think writing is a much more personal thing.

When I started writing short stories, I thought I was writing a novel. I had like 60 or 70 pages. And what I realized was that I don't write inner monologue. I don't want to talk about what somebody is thinking or feeling. I wanted to try to show it in an interesting way. And so what I realized was that I was really writing a screenplay.

Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.