Bird by Bird Quotes

“intelligence and insight and compassion. Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“E. L. Doctorow once said that "writing a novel is 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

“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: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town—still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done. Against all odds, you have put it down on paper, so that it won’t be lost. And who knows? Maybe what you’ve written will help others,”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion—not to look around and say, “Look at yourselves, you idiots!,” but to say, “This is who we are.” In this dark and wounded”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“finally smiled, remembering something I heard Ram Dass say on the radio once, about somebodyism—how most of us are raised to be somebodies and what a no-win game that is to buy into, because while you may turn out to be much more somebody than somebody else, a lot of other people are going to be a lot more somebody than you. And you are going to drive yourself crazy.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I wish there were an easier, softer way, a shortcut, but this is the nature of most good writing: that you find out things as you go along.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“same token, each of your characters has an emotional acre that they tend, or don’t tend, in certain specific ways. One of the things you want to discover as you start out is what each person’s acre looks like. What is the person growing, and what sort of shape is the land in?”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind—a scene, a locale, a character, whatever—and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys. They are the voices of anxiety, judgment, doom, guilt.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“But I also tell them that sometimes when my writer friends are working, they feel better and more alive than they do at any other time. And sometimes when they are writing well, they feel that they are living up to something”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“And they may even go from wanting to have written something to just wanting to be writing, wanting to be working on something, like they’d want to be playing the piano or tennis, because writing brings with it so much joy, so much challenge. It is work and play together.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Hey—lighten up, Francis.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“theme.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“If you’re lost in the forest, let the horse find the way home. You have to stop directing, because you will only get in the way.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Anyone who wants to can be surprised by the beauty or pain of the natural world, of the human mind and heart, and can try to capture that--the details, the nuance, what is.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“You don't get to sit next to your readers and explain little things you left out, or fill in details that would have made the action more interesting or believable. The material has got to work on its own, and the dream must be vivid and continuous.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“we won't love you if you're perfect”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping stone just right, you won't have to die.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done. If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can’t—and, in fact, you’re not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“There’s no way to tell until you’ve got it all down, and then there might just be one sentence or one character or one theme that you end up using. But you get it all down. You just write. I heard Natalie Goldberg, the author of Writing Down the Bones, speak on writing once. Someone asked her for the best possible writing advice she had to offer, and she held up a yellow legal pad, pretended her fingers held a pen, and scribbled away.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“fine, peanut butter and jelly were fine if your parents understood the jelly/jam issue. Grape jelly was best, by Jar, a nice slippery comforting sugary petroleum-product grape. Strawberry jam was second; everything else was iffy. Take raspberry, for instance—”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Your sandwich was the centerpiece, and there were strict guidelines. It almost goes without saying that store-bought white bread was the only acceptable bread. There were no exceptions. If your mother made the white bread for your sandwich, you could only hope that no one would notice. You certainly did not brag about it, any more than you would brag that she also made headcheese. And there were only a few things that your parents could put in between the two pieces of bread. Bologna was fine, salami and unaggressive cheese were”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Here is the main thing I know about public school lunches: it only looked like a bunch of kids eating lunch. It was really about opening our insides in front of everyone. Just like writing is. It was a precursor of the showers in seventh- and eighth-grade gym, where everyone could see your everything or your lack of everything, and smell the inside smells of your body, and the whole time you just knew you were going to catch something. The contents of your lunch said whether or not you and your family were Okay. Some bag lunches, like some people, were Okay, and some weren’t. There was a code, a right and acceptable way. It was that simple.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“One time, in one of my classes, I asked my students to write about lunches for half an hour, and I sat down with them and wrote:”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I know I set out to tell you every single thing I know about writing, but I am also going to tell you every single thing I know about school lunches, partly because the longings and dynamics and anxieties are so similar. I think this will also show how taking short assignments and then producing really shitty first drafts of these assignments can yield a bounty of detailed memory, raw material, and strange characters lurking in the shadows.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“But he might give you the courage or the stamina to write lots and lots of terrible first drafts, and then you’d learn that good second drafts can spring from these, and you’d see that big sloppy imperfect messes have value.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life