Anne Lamott Quotes

Good novels are not written, they're rewritten!

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.

Your book grows. The early part of your book is growing still while you are writing the later part of your book.

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

I do not read the works of Salman Rushdie, I write them. By the time I have finished writing them all I can think of is never reading them again. It's so deep, your involvement with a book, that once it's finished, then you are really done with it.

The great thing about the arts is that you can only learn to do it by doing it.

How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.

You can't be a writer if you don't write, it's just that simple.

The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake. If it’s a real dream, you cannot control it. When writing the book, you are awake; you can choose the time, the length, everything. I write for four or five hours in the morning and when the time comes, I stop. I can continue the next day. If it’s a real dream, you can’t do that.

The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it's all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.

Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.

Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.

Seventy percent of a first draft is garbage and 30 percent is gold, but you have to write 100 percent to get that 30.

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

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.