Lydia Millet Quotes

If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.

Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

I am oblique; I think that has to do with my own nature. I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will, so that finally the film does take on a texture and is not just simplistic communication.

Be obscure clearly.

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

Making a film confusing does not make it intelligent.

I don't like to just be simple. Even though some of my stuff can seem simple at times, I like to write in a way that, when you listen to it over and over again, you hear something new, and it requires you to think.

I personally feel like certain topics and certain issues aren't really being conveyed the right way in music nowadays. It's all very direct and to the point without leaving anything to the imagination.

You should avoid making yourself too clear even in your explanations.

Some consider the puzzles that are created by their omissions as spicy challenges, without which their texts would be boring; others shun clarity lest their work is considered trivial.

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.

I'd rather not ever make anything overly simple just because I'm scared people won't get it.

I find it very interesting to keep people uncertain about what is what and figure it out as they go.

Somehow it seems more clever to refer to something instead of saying it.

It's a murky world out there, and it's hard to figure things out sometimes.

The way I work, things are very nuanced; not everything is explained.

Life is complicated, and art has the right to be complicated, too. I don't like films that simplify.

one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

When you are describing, A shape, or sound, or tint; Don't state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint; And learn to look at all things, With a sort of mental squint.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

I say things, but I say them indirectly. At the same time, I try to make my images as direct as possible.

Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts.