Anne Lamott - Bird by Bird (1994)

99 Sourced Quotes

View all Anne Lamott Quotes
Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. The thing you had to force you 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.

Anne Lamott
The mix in our rooms is so touching: the clutter and the cracks in the wall belie a bleakness or brokenness in our lives; while photos and a few rare objects show our pride, our rare shining moments... these rooms are future ruins

Anne Lamott
My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean.

Anne Lamott
You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.

Anne Lamott
Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don't worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot.

Anne Lamott
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
He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.

Anne Lamott
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
If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.

Anne Lamott
Now, if you ask me, what's going on is that we're all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.

Anne Lamott
When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader.

Anne Lamott
Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

Anne Lamott
There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they'd burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure.

Anne Lamott
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.

Anne Lamott
After a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.

Anne Lamott
You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.

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

Anne Lamott
Your unconscious can't work when you are breathing down its neck.

Anne Lamott
If you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to.

Anne Lamott
There's an image I've heard people in recovery use—that getting all of one's addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed.

Anne Lamott
If we can believe in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, old Uncle Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you.

Anne Lamott
Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

Anne Lamott
Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.

Anne Lamott
We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.

Anne Lamott
A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.

Anne Lamott
Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

Anne Lamott
When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.

Anne Lamott
I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.

Anne Lamott
In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your own nest and say, This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.

Anne Lamott
Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.... Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation.... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

Anne Lamott