"Bird by Bird" quotes present a refreshing take on the challenges and joys of writing, encapsulating the rollercoaster of emotions writers often experience, from doubt and self-critique to moments of inspiration and self-discovery. Anne Lamott gently guides readers through the often messy and unpredictable journey of creation through a series of anecdotes, reflections, and practical tips.
The quotes from "Bird by Bird" encapsulate the essence of creative endeavor, vulnerability, and the art of embracing imperfection. The quotes from "Bird by Bird" invite us to embark on a journey of self-expression that embraces vulnerability, accepts imperfection, and revels in the beauty of the creative process.
Bird By Bird Quotes (2024)
Delve into the wisdom and inspiration "Bird by Bird" offers through this curated collection of quotes. These quotes encapsulate the essence of creative writing, self-discovery, and embracing the journey of crafting stories and navigating life.
These quotes resonate as insights into writing and life lessons that inspire us to approach our passions and pursuits with authenticity, determination, and the willingness to learn and grow.
"Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly."
"Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere."
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life."
"E.L. Doctorow once said that 'writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.'"
"But how?" my students ask. "How do you do it?" You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day."
"Good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are."
"Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't, and you're not supposed to know exactly what the picture will look like until it has finished developing."
"One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore."
"You can safely assume you've created God in your image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do."
"For some of us, books are as important as anything else. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you."
"Lighthouses don't run all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining."
"Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come."
"I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer."
"If you wanted to control someone, all you had to do was to be a little better than he was at something he valued."
"Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance."
"The story's moral is that the unknown future is a blank canvas on which we can create our own masterpiece."
"Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong."
"Write as if your parents are dead."
"Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued."
"I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident."
"Perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness, playfulness, and life force."
"The most freeing thing we learn in school is that we're not that hot."
"Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this."
"You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too."
"I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it."
"The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth."
"Every single thing that happened to you is yours, and you get to tell it."
"I don't think you have to suffer. It is natural that the first time you do anything new, particularly if it's difficult if you don't know what you're doing, you feel stupid and unskilled, and you don't want to show your stuff to a lot of people."
"So there's freedom in hitting bottom, in seeing that you won't be able to save or rescue your daughter, her spouse, his parents, or your career, relief in admitting you've reached the place of great unknowing."
"The world keeps turning, and people keep living and dying, and writing keeps going on."
"I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it."
"For some of us, books are as important as anything else. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you."
"You are lucky to be one of those people who wish to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander."
"You don't have to have a dramatic, fuck-this, I-quit-thing when you leave a job."
"If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library."
"I am going to notice the lights of the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars, the lights of our candles as we march, the lights with which spring teases us, the light that is already present."
"Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived."
"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul."
"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."
"The place of great unknowing is where all the important answers are."
"Hope is a tightly curled wish curled into a question mark and ripped open in the dark."
"Any healthy half-awake person is occasionally going to be pierced with a sense of the unfairness and the catastrophe and the sheer common minuteness of life."
"We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little."
"I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be."
"I know that when I pray, something wonderful happens. Not just to the person or persons for whom I'm praying but also something wonderful happens to me. I'm grateful that I'm heard."
"In the creative acts of painting, writing, and living, there are helping hands."
"I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish."
"To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass, seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one."
"The very first things I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop are: 'Write a lot. Write solidly for two years. Write to get noticed.'"
"If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work."
"Grace and redemption, when it finds you, will drop you on your head. Not because you deserved it, but because that's how it works."
"I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting and pushing, manipulating our characters down this wild and terrifying road to self-discovery."
"I know the constant interruption of unwanted thoughts, the way they suck up all my attention, draining me of my essence."
"I didn't need to sound as though I'd had a lobotomy."
"To be alive and writing is to experience our insignificance and ignorance on an enormous scale."
"I know a wise Buddhist monk who, when asked if he could concentrate on anything for very long, began to laugh and said, 'If you could see what I do, you would say I had the attention span of a lightning bolt.'"
"Dough, not how."
"Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on."
"My only hope was to buy the right pair of shoes. My only hope was to buy shoes that were going to take me places."
"Even if I am not the hero of my story, I can still be the heroine. My own character."
"Good writing is about telling the truth."
"My writing improved as I started to think of others besides me."
"It was a lucky choice that I was a novelist, not a journalist."
"I don't know whether this story is completely true or not, but I know it's useful."
"Never compare your insides with other people's outsides."
"Even with a wound that deep, it's possible to have a great life."
"There is nothing wrong with earnestness, but it doesn't begin to express the pain and pleasure of creation."
"I could have used a big padlock."
"I have a lot of fun working with my characters, and I've missed them since I left them."
"Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend."
"In childhood, you learn how to color inside the lines. In adulthood, you learn how to color outside them."
"Sometimes your unconscious will take you in directions that you never intended to go. The important thing is to start, to keep writing."
"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
"I used to write food reviews for California magazine. I was fired from that job."
"Most of us have the deep-rooted and fierce urge to take our mental illness and fling it at someone else."
"You are lucky to be one of those people who wish to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander."
"An obsession, if indulged, will beat a talent, skill, or education any day of the week."
"You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
"You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing."
"Most writers are desperate to be published but don't want to write anything that someone has already written."
"Say you're quieter than a coral snake and use the directive mood."
"Writing is about seeing through the veils that narrow people's vision."
"To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal, but you have to care."
"A book will exalt and sustain you. A book will be your friend. A book will lighten your heavy baggage and strengthen your slender wings."
"No one ever leaves your childhood."
"Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly."
"If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don't ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately."
"You have to give something up to be good at it."
"Your characters will tell you what they want to say."
"It's okay to write crap."
"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you."
"Most people have all sorts of hang-ups about putting anything negative or gross or repellent in their books."
"I am always sorry when any of my friends lose someone they love."
"You don't have to suffer to be a good writer. But you do have to write."
"What goes on in your mind is like a freight train of thought."
"Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued."
"I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident."
"I often use exercises from 'The Artist's Way' in classes that I teach."
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that you won't have to die if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping stone just right. The truth is that you will die anyway and that many people who aren't even looking at their feet will do a lot better than you and have a lot more fun while they're doing it."
"If you're not enough without it, you'll never be enough with it."
"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
"I think we are often afraid that we will be overwhelmed by our pain, our terror, that we will be eaten alive by it."
"It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing."
"You know, you are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver."
"Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong."
"You write a book, and it's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You don't know if it will ever reach any shores. And there you are, on your desert island, alone and alone and alone."
"You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side."
"What we're all trying to do in this racket is write about the human condition and tell the truth about it."
"Keep in mind that when people offer you advice, they are really just talking to themselves in the past."
"Writing can be a very spiritual practice."
"Remember that you are writing for yourself. Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in the mood to hear. Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're all too busy reading the same sorts of things anyway, so you'll be in good company."
"The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by."
"You are lucky to be one of those people who wish to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander."
"One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, 'It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do – you can either type or kill yourself.'"
"We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be arranging furniture in rooms you've already been in."
"If something is shitty, it's probably worth writing about."
"Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance."
"It is a good thing to copy good work. But only copy work if you want to be good and if you believe you can do better than the work you are copying."
"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
"The very first things I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop are: 'Write a lot. Write solidly for two years. Write to get noticed.'"
"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
"I am going to notice the lights of the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars, the lights with which spring teases us, the light that is already present."
"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul."
"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."
"I know that when I pray, something wonderful happens. Not just to the person or persons for whom I'm praying but also to something wonderful happens to me. I'm grateful that I'm heard."
"In the creative acts of painting, writing, and living, there are helping hands."
"I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish."
"To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass, seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one."
"The most freeing thing we learn in school is that we're not that hot."
"The world keeps turning, and people keep living and dying, and writing keeps going on."
Quotes from Bird by Bird encompass the essence of the writer's journey, self-discovery, and the art of crafting stories. These quotes highlight the struggles, triumphs, and wisdom that Anne Lamott shares with aspiring writers.
As you navigate the path of creativity, remember Lamott's words: "You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories." Through the highs and lows of the writing process, let these quotes inspire you to create, persevere, and embrace the transformative power of storytelling.
