Annie Dillard - Write Quotes

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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Annie Dillard
On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

Annie Dillard
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Annie Dillard
He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.

Annie Dillard
Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

Annie Dillard
It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

Annie Dillard
At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting

Annie Dillard
The writer... is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

Annie Dillard
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you will find yourself deep in new territory.

Annie Dillard
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

Annie Dillard
Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

Annie Dillard