Anne Lamott Quotes

I think you have to always stay focused and positive. If your positive energy dies out, like it happened to me for some time, then you can't do anything.

Great effort springs naturally from great attitude.

Every time you think a negative thought, it's one step in the wrong direction, for me.

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.

Tennis is an individual sport, and I am quite a self-conscious person.

In football you have an adversary; in cinema that adversary is yourself.

I think we've all been in the middle of doing something we cared about, when someone coming in the room and saying 'hello' was annoying. I personally can understand that, as someone who tries to create.

A positive attitude is something everyone can work on, and everyone can learn how to employ it.

I don't deal with writer's block, I don't allow myself to believe that there is such a thing. I think that there are good days and a lot more less good days.

You can be more productive, confident, comfortable with insecurity.

Nothing makes you try harder than to be told that you are not good enough or that you simply do not have the skills.

If you focus on the negative side, it just brings your confidence down.

After my debut didn't go very well with Holt, I needed to be in a healthier head space. I was happy to emerge from there. You will always have those negative thoughts as a writer, but you can't let them take over. If you let them take over, those are the real page killers.

Part of my success was rooted in psychology.

My motto is, 'You may not be as good as you think you are, but thinking you are is good.'

All one's work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.

Never believe anything you think about yourself as a writer when you're not writing.

If you don't think you can do it, who will? You control the most important tool in success, your mind.

An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.

The uplifters are forever running around telling blockheads they would do better if they would believe in themselves. But they already do. That is why they are blockheads.

One of the problems we have as writers is we don't take ourselves seriously while writing; being serious is setting aside a time and saying if it comes, good; if it doesn't come, good, I'll just sit here.

Discipline is the only sure way I know to convince people to believe in themselves

I'm shy; I work hard.