Annie Dillard Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Secret, What You Love

• One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. . . . Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

  Annie Dillard

  Book, Writing, Play

  "The Writing Life". Book by Annie Dillard, archive.nytimes.com. 1989.

• I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

  Annie Dillard

  Book, Writing, Hands

• He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Careful, Knows

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.83, Canongate Books

• One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.

  Annie Dillard

  Inspirational, Life, Book

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.88, Canongate Books

• I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.

  Annie Dillard

  Book, Struggle, Writing

• At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Grace, Looks

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.87, Canongate Books

• Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

  Annie Dillard

  Dog, Pain, Book

• Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Dying, Patient

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.82, Canongate Books

• Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

  Annie Dillard

  Memories, Work, Writing

• Write about winter in the summer.

  Annie Dillard

  Summer, Writing, Winter

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.82, Canongate Books

• The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.

  Annie Dillard

  Book, Writing, Sound

• At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Night, Years

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.40, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

• Write as if you are dying.

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Dying, Ifs

• Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

  Annie Dillard

  Memories, Writing, Past

  Annie Dillard, Robert Atwan (1988). “The Best American Essays”

• On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Three, Four

  Annie Dillard (2009). “The Writing Life”, p.14, Harper Collins

• Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

  Annie Dillard

  Real, Writing, Small Rooms

• The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, & it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination’s vision, & the imagination’s hearing—& the moral sense, & the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks & exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Blood, Smell

• For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Ordinary, Doe

• You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Frustration, Thinking

• It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.

  Annie Dillard

  Silly, Writing, Long Ago

• I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.

  Annie Dillard

  Art, Book, Writing

• Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Encounters, Use

• Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.

  Annie Dillard

  Baby, Children, Book

• When you write, you lay out a line of words.
  Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Finding Yourself, Lines

  Annie Dillard (2009). “The Writing Life”, p.3, Harper Collins

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