Annie Dillard - Writer Quotes

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Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

Annie Dillard
Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.

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
Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

Annie Dillard
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

Annie Dillard
It should surprise no one that the life of the writer — such as it is — is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

Annie Dillard
Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.

Annie Dillard
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.

Annie Dillard
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

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

Annie Dillard