Anne Waldman Quotes

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.

I think writing gives me creative freedom.

Writing is more important than being a writer.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

Men are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.

I love to write.

I don't see the world unless I see it in ink.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.

I love writing different things.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy that kind of process.