Bird by Bird Quotes

“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

“We’re bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I read more than other kids; I luxuriated in books. Books were my refuge.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I can teach them little things that may not be in any of the great books on writing. For instance, I’m not sure if anyone else has mentioned that December is traditionally a bad month for writing. It is a month of Mondays. Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk.”
― 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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“The problem that comes up over and over again is that these people want to be published. They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“The other is to think of the writers who have given a book to me, and then to write a book back to them. This gift they have given us, which we pass on to those around us, was fashioned out of their lives. You wouldn’t be a writer if reading hadn’t enriched your soul more than other pursuits. So write a book back to V. S. Naipaul or Margaret Atwood or Wendell Berry or whoever it is who most made you want to write, whose work you most love to read. Make it as good as you can. It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I walked to the lip of the water and let the foamy tongue of the rushing liquid lick my toes. A sand crab burrowed a hole a few inches from my foot and then disappeared into the damp sand.…”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I felt that in my strange new friends and in certain new books, I was meeting my other half. Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.) I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I’ve managed to get some work done nearly every day of my adult life, without impressive financial success.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not to go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in—then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Good writing is about telling the truth.”
― 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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“The sky was blue and cloudless, everything was in bloom, and she wore a little lavender cotton cap. She was doing very well that day, except that she was dying.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed. As roses, up from ground. Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines, now a horse being saddled. It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I was waiting for the kind of solution where God reaches down and touches you with his magic wand and all of a sudden I would be fixed, like a broken toaster oven. But this was not the way it happened. Instead, I got one angstrom unit better, day by day.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“that getting all of one’s addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed.”
― 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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I’d shake my head and not mention that what I love are cut flowers, because this sounds so violent and decadent, like when Salvador Dalí said his favorite animal was fillet of sole.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“And what a wonderful relief every so often to know who the enemy is—because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph—and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I do not love to garden. I love other people’s gardens, and I like cut flowers. I have Astroturf and a whole lot of high-quality plastic flowers stuck in the dirt of our front yard. These are quite a lovely sight and bring to mind many e. e. cummings poems. People used to give me potted plants and trees, and what happened to them is really too horrible to go into here.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“All you can give us is what life is about from your point of view. You are not going to be able to give us the plans to the submarine. Life is not a submarine. There are no plans.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life