Bird by Bird Quotes

“Your work as a writer, when you are giving everything you have to your characters and to your readers, will periodically make you feel like the single parent of a three-year-old, who is, by turns, wonderful, willful, terrible, crazed, and adoring. Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel. Other times they'll reach out and touch you like adoring grandparents on their deathbeds trying to memorize your face with their fingers...Your three-year-old and your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that's one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they've given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“And I don’t think you have that kind of time either. 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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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

“clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground—you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“If you want to know how God feels about money, look at who she gives it to”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Getting all your addictions under control is like trying to put an octopus to bed”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to sart writing is that you start thinking like a writer”
― 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”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“. I could make it vivid and funny, and even exaggerate some of it so that the event became almost mythical, and the people involved seemed larger, and there was a sense of larger significance, of meaning.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“They are angry people. This is why they write.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“On writer's block: The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you're empty.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“We're mimics, we're parrots - we're writers.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“You could see the amazing fortitude of people going through horror with grace, looking right into the pit and seeing that this is what you've got, this disease, or maybe even jealousy. So you do as well as you can with it. And this ravaged body or wounded psyche can and should be still be cared for as softly and tenderly as possible.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer - please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“So try to calm down, get quiet, breathe, and listen.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I'm not suggesting that you want to be an author who tells a story in order to teach a moral or deliver a message. If you have a message, as Samuel Goldwyn said, send a telegram.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Sometimes you run into someone, regardless of age or sex, whom you know absolutely to be an independently operating part of the Whole that goes on all the time inside yourself, and the eye-motes go click and you hear the tribal tones of voice resonate, and there it is - you recognize them.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“For the climax, there must be a killing or a healing or a domination.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Find out what each character cares most in the world because then you will have discovered what's at stake.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“The development of relationship creates plot.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“The first draft is the down draft - you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft - you fix it up.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear the hat of belonging.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“You wouldn’t be a writer if reading hadn’t enriched your soul more than other pursuits.”
― 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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they’ve given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve thought that there was something noble and mysterious about writing, about the people who could do it well, who could create a world as if they were little gods or sorcerers. All my life I’ve felt that there was something magical about people who could get into other people’s minds and skin, who could take people like me out of ourselves and then take us back to ourselves. And you know what? I still do.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“But the idea of spending entire days in someone else’s office doing someone else’s work did not suit my father’s soul.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“There’s an image I’ve heard people in recovery use—that getting all of one’s addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed. I think this perfectly describes the process of solving various problems in your final draft. You get a bunch of the octopus’s arms neatly tucked under the covers—that is, you’ve come up with a plot, resolved the conflict between the two main characters, gotten the tone down pat—but two arms are still flailing around. Maybe the dialogue in the first half and the second half don’t match, or there is that one character who still seems one-dimensional. But you finally get those arms under the sheets, too, and are about to turn off the lights when another long sucking arm breaks free.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life