Annie Dillard Quotes About Writing
-
Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
→ -
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.
→ -
I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
→ -
Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
→ -
When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
→ -
I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.
→ -
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.
→ -
I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.
→ -
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
→ -
Write about winter in the summer.
→ -
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.
→ -
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. 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. . . . Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. 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.
→ -
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
→ -
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. 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.
→ -
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
→ -
Write as if you are dying.
→ -
Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.
→ -
Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
→ -
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
→ -
Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
→ -
Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
→ -
For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
→ -
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.
→ -
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
→ -
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. 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.
→ -
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.
→ -
It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
→ -
The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
→ -
You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.
→ -
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?
→
Related Authors
-
Sylvia Plath Poet -
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist -
Terry Tempest Williams Author -
John McPhee Writer -
Edward Abbey Author -
Henri Nouwen Priest -
Mary Oliver Poet -
Frederick Buechner Writer -
Natalie Goldberg Author -
Thomas Merton Writer -
Ann Patchett Author -
Wallace Stegner Historian -
Barry Lopez Author -
Carl Sandburg Writer -
Joan Didion Author -
Aldo Leopold Author -
Wendell Berry Novelist -
Henry David Thoreau Author -
Robert D. Richardson Historian -
Anne Lamott Novelist