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Not writing at all leads to nothing.

Anna Quindlen

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Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Leads
Nothing
Writing

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.
Anna Quindlen
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I really feel like if you can get past your fear, if you can say, Uh-uh, I'm afraid to do that and I'm going to do it anyhow, that that's really the way to have a satisfying life moving forward. I think I had that kind of fearlessness even as a young person. It wasn't tempered by experience or wisdom, but it took me a long way.
Anna Quindlen
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I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when I was 19 and my mother died, and one was when I was 31 and my first child was born. And that sort of gave me a kind of rebirth that I think has been invaluable to me as a novelist, in terms of seeing the world anew.
Anna Quindlen
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Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.
Anna Quindlen
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part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.
Anna Quindlen
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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.
Anna Quindlen
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I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.
Anna Quindlen
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I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.
Anna Quindlen
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One of the interesting things I discovered, talking about your grandmother, is I did a search of my uses of the word elderly in my copy over the years, and you will not be surprised to hear that the older I got the less often I used the word elderly in print.
Anna Quindlen
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When you really want to say no, say no. You can't do everything - or at least not well.
Anna Quindlen
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Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.
Anna Quindlen
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We almost manage to forget that things happen that we don't anticipate.
Anna Quindlen
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People ask me all the time if I'm from a family of writers. The literal short answer is no, but my father and his brothers and sisters and his mother are all people who would sit around with a Tom Collins and tell stories that seemed to get better and better each time they told them.
Anna Quindlen
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What had I expected of the first child? Everything. Rocket scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated hitter. We talked wisely at cocktail parties about the sad mistake our mothers had made in pinning all their hopes and dreams on us. We were full of it.
Anna Quindlen
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London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.
Anna Quindlen
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I'll tell you the truth - I went to a women's college, Barnard, the most selective college for women in America today. If there's one thing I came out of Barnard with, because it was a women's college and a great institution of higher education, it was fearlessness.
Anna Quindlen
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The closest thing to an outline is, because my memory is so bad now, if something occurs to me that I think might be important or pivotal, a lot of times I'll scribble notes down somewhere until I can get back to the book. Of course half the time I look at those notes the next morning and think, What was that about?
Anna Quindlen
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Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? Keep her, I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.
Anna Quindlen
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The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific andtorturous, involving and utterly tedious, all at the same time. The world is full of women made to feel strange because what everyone assumes comes naturally is so difficult to do--never mind to do well.
Anna Quindlen
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Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center. ... but they ignore complexity, change, and individuality.
Anna Quindlen