Annie Dillard - The Writing Life (1989)

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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Annie Dillard
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

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

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 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
This is your life. You are a Seminole alligator wrestler. Half naked, with your two bare hands, you hold and fight a sentence's head while its tail tries to knock you over.

Annie Dillard
Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.... Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Annie Dillard
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

Annie Dillard
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

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
Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

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
Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.

Annie Dillard
Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life.

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
Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

Annie Dillard
Einstein likened the generation of a new idea to a chicken's laying an egg: "Kieks — auf einmal is es da." Cheep — and all at once it is there. Of course, Einstein was not above playing to the crowd.

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

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
The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.

Annie Dillard
The dog opened one eye, cocked it at me, and rolled it up before her lids closed. People should not feed moralistic animals. If they're so holy, where are their books?

Annie Dillard
Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

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
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
If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.

Annie Dillard
There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.

Annie Dillard
Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air.

Annie Dillard
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

Annie Dillard
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.

Annie Dillard