Bird by Bird Quotes

“I let my mind wander.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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 try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning-- sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don't ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately. You need to put yourself at their center, you and what you believe to be true or right. The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe are the language in which you are writing.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“...it was once again that business of comparing my insides to other people's outsides.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“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

“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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Take the attitude that what you're thinking and feeling is valuable stuff, and then be naive enough to get it all down on paper. But, be careful: if your intuition says that your story sucks, make sure it really is your intuition and not your mother.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can Mae the whole trip that way.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I wish I felt that kind of inspiration more often. I almost never do. All I know is that if I sit there long enough, something will happen.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“they sit down and write one sentence and see with horror that it is a bad one, and then every major form of mental illness from which they suffer surfaces, leaping out of the water like trout—the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the hand-washing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias. And especially, the paranoia.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Annie Dillard has said that 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

“On a bad day you also don’t need a lot of advice. You just need a little empathy and affirmation. You need to feel once again that other people have confidence in you. The”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“a person's faults are largely what make him or her likable”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point at you, while a chilling voice thundered, “We told you not to tell.” But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“And the truth of your experience can onlycome through in your own voice. If it is wrapped in someone else's voice, we readers will feel suspicious, as if you are dressed up in someone else's clothes. You cannot write out of someone else's big dark place; you can only write out of your own.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are. The secrecy, the obfuscation, the fact that these monsters can only be hinted at, gives us the sense that they must be very bad indeed. But when people let their monsters out for a little onstage interview, it turns out that we've all done or thought the same things, that this is our lot, our condition. We don't end up with a brand on our forehead. Instead, we compare notes.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Toni Morrison said, 'The function of freedom is to free someone else,' and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it, and I don't think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect. You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water--just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Then I started to write about my envy. I got to look in some cold dark corners, see what was there, shine a little light on what we all have in common. Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic--jealousy especially so--but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I once asked Ethan Canin to tell me the most valuable thing he knew about writing and without hesitation he said, 'Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.' I think he's right. If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn't really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time... Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud, whose lines you always want to steal... By the same token, a boring or annoying person can offer to buy you an expensive dinner, followed by tickets to a great show, an in all honesty you'd rather stay home and watch the aspic set.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“So much of writing is about sitting down and doing it every day, and so much of it is about getting into the custom of taking in everything that comes along, seeing it all as grist for the mill. This can be a very comforting habit, like biting your nails. Instead of being scared all the time, you detach, watch what goes on, and consider it creatively. Instead of feeling panicked by those lowlifes on the subway, you notice all the details of their clothes and bearing and speech. Maybe you never quite get to the point where you think, “Ah—so that’s what a gun looks like from this end.” But you take in all you can, as a child would, without the atmospheric smog of most grown-up vision.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Sometimes ritual quiets the racket. Try it. Any number of things may work for you—an altar, for instance, or votive candles, sage smudges, small-animal sacrifices, especially now that the Supreme Court has legalized them. (I cut out the headline the day this news came out and taped it above the kitty’s water dish.) Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life