Bird by Bird Quotes

“Of course, there will always be more you could do, but you have to remind yourself that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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 can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, “This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. 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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

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

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

“I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. 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

“A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost,”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“When KFKD is playing, we are at cross purposes with the river. So we need to sit there, and breathe, calm ourselves down, push back our sleeves, and begin again.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“if you’ve worked in good faith for a couple of hours but cannot hear it today, have some lunch.”
― 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.”
― 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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. But you can’t do that if you’re not respectful. If you look at people and just see sloppy clothes or rich clothes, you’re going to get them wrong.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“even though you know that your manuscript is not perfect and you’d hoped for so much more, but if you also know that there is simply no more steam in the pressure cooker and that it’s the very best you can do for now—well? I think this means that you are done.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Try to remember that to some extent, you’re just the typist. A good typist listens.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“There is a real skill to hearing all those words that real people—and your characters—say and to recording what you have heard—and the latter is or should be more interesting and concise and even more true than what was actually said.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“There is no cosmic importance to your getting published, but there is in learning to be a giver.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It’s a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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

“It may strike you as a small miracle that you have someone in your life, whose taste you admire, who will tell you the truth and help you stay on the straight and narrow, or find your way back to it if you are lost.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“But I try to make sure they understand that writing, and even getting good at it, and having books and stories and articles published, will not open the doors that most of them hope for. It will not make them well. It will not give them the feeling that the world has finally validated their parking tickets, that they have in fact finally arrived. My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Other days, though, my writing is like a person to me—the person who, after all these years, still makes sense to me.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“But I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. 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. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life