Anne Lamott Quotes

Working with language requires beauty for me.

Find something you like, go into a room, close the door and read it aloud. Read it aloud. Everybody in the world who likes dance can see dance, or hear music, or see art, or admire architecture - but everybody in the world uses words who is not a recluse or mute. But the writer has to take these most common things, more common than musical notes or dance positions, a writer has to take some adverbs, and verbs and nouns and ball them up together and make them bounce.

For me, you have to not have a formula. You have to not even sit down and say, 'I want to write right now.' It has to just kind of come out. It's not something you can plan.

I write in a rush of memory.

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

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

I've never had writer's block.

When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it.

I'm not a fast, stream-of-consciousness lyricist at all - I know some guys who are, and if there is one skill I wish I had, it's that.

The way to compose for me is to have lots of time.

There are a lot of elements when you're writing, or when I'm writing, that are sitting in the back of your mind. I try to let them stay there, because they find their way in more naturally that way.

When you're writing, you're putting thought into what you want to express, and then you come up with it - it comes to you. When you're improvising, it's the same thing. You're writing. You just say it out loud right then, instead of saying, 'You think this might work?'

When I'm writing, I'll just say random stuff that doesn't make sense, and then a certain word that I keep saying will stick out, and I'll write from there.

I don't consciously think of any certain direction when I'm writing. I only try not to be repetitive or redundant.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

The artist in me welcomes another opportunity to be creative.

I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

And when I'm writing well and when I'm inside the feeling, then I can do fairly complicated things with some fluency.

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?

To create is to relate. We trust in the artist in everybody to make his own connections, his own juxtapositions.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.