Quotes by Lidia Yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch

As far as being territorial about one’s own life, that’s a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for “material.” Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.

Amplify

Drawing

Mistake

Books, like all art, breed in us desire. In times of crisis and fear and misrepresentation we need desire, or else we shut down and hide out in our houses, succumbing to infotainment and the ease of an available latte, turning off our brains and emotions. Books breed desire.

Art

Book

House

Certainly I’m participating in an already established and awesome tradition, but it’s a tradition that sort of shoots up and through the mainstream in short bursts and pulses and then gets diluted. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson shot up and then got sucked back down underground under more entertaining and less radical versions of body and self – poetry and prose that posited bodies in more perfect union with good citizenship.

Body

Perfect

Self

Every once in a while a messy character who manifests a REAL body emerges, for instance, Lisbeth Salander – and certainly commercial genre fiction is full of examples of real bodied sexual encounters or violence encounters – but for the most part, and particularly if you are a woman or minority author, your characters’ bodies have to fit a kind of norm inside a narrow set of narrative pre-ordained and sanctioned scripts.

Character

Example

Real

I get kind of tired of the “But it’s your life!” attitude about memoir. I wrote. I engaged in artistic production. I made a piece of art. Why the preciousness or mystical unicorns around “memoir”? I’m curious how you feel about it just now.

Art

Attitude

Tired

I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done.

Book

Girl

Writing

I’m in love with language again because Luke B. Goebel is not afraid to take us back through the gullet of loss into the chaos of words. Someone burns a manuscript in Texas; someone’s speed sets a life on fire; a heart is beaten nearly to death, the road itself is the trip, a man is decreated back to his animal past–better, beyond ego, beautiful, and look: there’s an American dreamscape left. There’s a reason to go on.

Beautiful

Heart

Loss

I’ve noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe.

Believe

Past

Years

In water, like in books—you can leave your life.

Book

Water

Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief

Delirium

Grief

Laughter

Follow The Behaviour University in order to get the greatest quotes from the greatest people of all time so that you can tap into your own greatness.

Agents

Amplify

Art

Ass

Attitude

Beautiful

Believe

Blow

Body

Book

Character

Choices

Crazy

Dark

Delirium

Drawing

Editors

Example

Feelings

Fiction

Forgive Me

Forgiving

Form

Girl

Grief

Heart

Hero

House

Jesus

Kindness

Laughter

Life

Life Experience

Light

Loss

Memoir

Men

Mistake

Mother

Moving

Ocean

Order

Past

People

Perfect

Practice

Projects

Real

Reality

Sadness

The Future Blueprint

Tool

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

Tool

The Autobiography

Tool

The Behaviour Diary

Tool

The Dating Diary

Tool

The Relationship Therapist

Tool

Quotes by Lidia Yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch

As far as being territorial about one’s own life, that’s a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for “material.” Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.

Books, like all art, breed in us desire. In times of crisis and fear and misrepresentation we need desire, or else we shut down and hide out in our houses, succumbing to infotainment and the ease of an available latte, turning off our brains and emotions. Books breed desire.

I get kind of tired of the “But it’s your life!” attitude about memoir. I wrote. I engaged in artistic production. I made a piece of art. Why the preciousness or mystical unicorns around “memoir”? I’m curious how you feel about it just now.

I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done.

I’ve noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe.

In water, like in books—you can leave your life.

Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief

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Topics by Lidia Yuknavitch

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

The Relationship Therapist

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