Anne Lamott Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Should Have, People

  Twitter post from Apr 23, 2012

• Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.

  Anne Lamott

  Running, Fun, Writing

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.28, Anchor

• I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do - the actual act of writing - turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, People, Giving

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.26, Anchor

• You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born.

  Anne Lamott

  Song, Memories, Writing

• Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Effort, Needs

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.25, Anchor

• I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, People, Trying

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.26, Anchor

• For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

  Anne Lamott

  Motivational, Book, Reading

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.15, Anchor

• One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Giving, Looks

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.12, Anchor

• If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

  Anne Lamott

  Real, Writing, Emotional

• My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.

  Anne Lamott

  Gratitude, Ocean, Grateful

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.15, Anchor

• We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Sheep, Needs

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.3, Anchor

• Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship

  Anne Lamott

  Reading, Writing, Heart

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.237, Anchor

• The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Sheep, Needs

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.3, Anchor

• Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

  Anne Lamott

  Brother, Father, Book

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, Anchor

• I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

  Anne Lamott

  Book, Writing, Students

• We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Men, Important

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.51, Anchor

• You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.

  Anne Lamott

  Hurt, Writing, Eye

• Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Giving, Surprise

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.26, Anchor

• I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.

  Anne Lamott

  Memories, Writing, Worry

• Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

  Anne Lamott

  Believe, Writing, Done

• Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.

  Anne Lamott

  Beautiful, Writing, Innocence

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.205, Anchor

• Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

  Anne Lamott

  Reading, Writing, Soul

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.237, Anchor

• E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Night, Two

• To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

  Anne Lamott

  Philosophy, Writing, Thinking

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.107, Anchor

• Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.

  Anne Lamott

  Book, Communication, Home

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