Bird by Bird Quotes

“If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want—won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“If you stop trying to control your mind so much, you'll have intuitive hunches about what this or that character is all about.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“My true religion is kindness." That is a great moral position - practicing kindness, keeping one's heart open in the presence of suffering.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“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

“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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I happened to mention this to a hypnotist I saw many years ago, and he looked at me very nicely. At first I thought he was feeling around on the floor for the silent alarm button, but then he gave me the following exercise, which I still use to this day. Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want—won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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

“Write about your childhoods, I tell them for the umpteenth time. Write about that time in your life when you were so intensely interested in the world, when your powers of observation were at their most acute, when you felt things so deeply. Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“John Gardner wrote that the writer is creating a dream into which he or she invites the reader, and that the dream must be vivid and continuous.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“You set out to tell a story of some sort, to tell the truth as you feel it, because something is calling you to do so. It calls you like the beckoning finger of smoke in cartoons that rises off the pie cooling on the windowsill, slides under doors and into mouse holes or into the nostrils of the sleeping man or woman in the easy chair. Then the aromatic smoke crooks its finger, and the mouse or the man or woman rises and follows, nose in the air. But some days the smoke is faint and you just have to follow it as best you can, sniffing away. Still, even on those days, you might notice how great perseverance feels. And the next day the scent may seem stronger—or it may just be that you are developing a quiet doggedness. This is priceless.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide. It stands out, like a baby's fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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 can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“And if minor characters show an inclination to become major characters … you at least give them a shot at it, because … just as in the real world it may take you many years to find out that the stranger you talked to once for half an hour in the railroad station may have done more to point you to where your true homeland lies than your priest or your best friend or even your psychiatrist.”
― 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. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out...”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need, and who we think we are.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“it may just be that you are developing a quiet doggedness. This is priceless. Perfectionism, on the other hand, will only drive you mad.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling you talent run down your leg and into your sock.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen 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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“if you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.”
― 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.” 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

“I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird