Bird by Bird Quotes

“I wish I had a secret I could let you in on, some formula my father passed on to me in a whisper just before he died, some code word that has enabled me to sit at my desk and land flights of creative inspiration like an air-traffic controller.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“You may feel a little as if writing a novel is like trying to level Mount McKinley with a dentist’s drill.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“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

“We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise you'll be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer's job is to see what's behind it, to see that bleak, unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words -- not just any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.”
― 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

“I scuttled across the screen like Prufrock's crab. I was very clearly the one who was going to grow up to be a serial killer, or to keep dozens and dozens of cats. Instead, I got funny.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life—wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Time is so full for people who are dying in a conscious way, full in the way that life is for children. They spend big round hours.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“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

“A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded”?”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.”
― 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

“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. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of. 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 work done... 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

“What your giving can do is to help your readers be braver, be better than they are, be open to the world again.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“We write to expose the unexposed”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“My deepest belief is that to live as if we’re dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I still think they should write with everything they have, daily if possible, and for the rest of their lives.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Life is not a submarine. There are no plans.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Начинайте с детства, отвечаю я. Зажмите нос и ныряйте. Запишите все свои воспоминания по возможности точно. Фланнери О’Коннор говорила: любой, кто пережил детство, набрал достаточно материала на всю оставшуюся жизнь. Если ваше детство было тяжелым и беспросветным — что ж, и мрачная вещь сойдет, была бы хорошо сделана. Насчет «хорошо», правда, пока лучше забыть. Главное — начать.”
― Энн Ламотт, Bird by Bird

“Эдгар Доктороу однажды сказал: «Писать роман — это как вести машину ночью. Видишь только то, что фары выхватывают из темноты; и все же так можно проделать весь путь». Не надо видеть конечную цель, не надо видеть пункт назначения и все то, что будешь проезжать по дороге. Достаточно видеть на несколько метров вперед. Это, пожалуй, один из лучших советов насчет писательства какие мне доводилось слышать. Да и насчет жизни вообще.”
― Энн Ламотт, Bird by Bird

“The second question my students ask about a writing partner is this: what if someone agrees to read and work on your stuff for you, and you have agreed to do the same for him, say, and it turns out that he says things about your work, even in the nicest possible tone of voice, that are totally negative and destructive? You find yourself devastated, betrayed. Here you’ve done this incredibly gutsy thing, shown someone your very heart and soul, and he doesn’t think it’s any good. He says how sorry he is that this is how he feels. Well, let me tell you this—I don’t think he is. I think destroying your work gave him real pleasure, pleasure he would never cop to, pleasure that is almost sexual in nature. I think you should get rid of this person immediately, even if you are married to him. No one should talk to you like this.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what’s keeping things running right. We’re bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below. With that fact in mind, people like me make up all these rules to give us the illusion that we are in charge. I need to say to myself, they’re not needed, hon. Just take in the buggy pleasures. Be kind to the others, grab the fleck of riverweed, notice how beautifully your bug legs scull.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I heard Marianne Williamson say once that when you ask God into your life, you think he or she is going to come into your psychic house, look around, and see that you just need a new floor or better furniture and that everything needs just a little cleaning—and so you go along for the first six months thinking how nice life is now that God is there. Then you look out the window one day and see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out that God actually thinks your whole foundation is shot and you’re going to have to start over from scratch.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“and hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Writing Down the Bones,”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Carolyn Chute, the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine,”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life