Bird by Bird Quotes

“that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around. Writing”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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 nest and say, “This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.” And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing. After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know, and when you get serious you will be dealing with the one thing you’ve been avoiding all along—your wounds. This is very painful. It stops a lot of people early on who didn’t get into this for the pain. They got into it for the money and the fame. So they either quit, or they resort to a type of writing that is sort of like candy making.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“They cramp around our wounds—the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both—to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don’t even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“… good dialogue encompasses both what is said and what is not said.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

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

“Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“for a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death—the greatest leisure of all.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, "It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do—you can either type or kill yourself.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Writer’s block is going to happen to you. You will read what little you’ve written lately and see with absolute clarity that it is total dog shit.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“that the dream must be vivid and continuous.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do—you can either type or kill yourself.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You’ll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Remember the scene in Cat Ballou where a very drunk Lee Marvin goes from unconscious to ranting to triumphant to roaring to weeping defeat, and then finally passes out? One of the men watching him says, with real awe, “I never seen a man get through a day so fast.” Don’t let this be you.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I read them a poem by Phillip Lopate that someone once sent me, that goes: We who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting, as a group, to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift. Your analyst is in on it, plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband; and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us. In announcing our association we realize we have placed in your hands a possible antidote against uncertainty indeed against ourselves. But since our Thursday nights have brought us to a community of purpose rare in itself with you as the natural center, we feel hopeful you will continue to make unreasonable demands for affection if not as a consequence of your disastrous personality then for the good of the collective.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“However, in the meantime, we are going to concentrate on writing itself, on how to become a better writer, because, for one thing, becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. 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, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself 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. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) 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—and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California).”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life