Quote

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

Anne Lamott

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Writing
Going
Hypnotizing
Work
Coldly
Believe
Believing
Material
Materials
Getting
Done

More quotes by Anne Lamott

Image
Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I'm just trying to trust that.
Anne Lamott
Image
My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.
Anne Lamott
Image
I write everything as a wake-up call to myself and others, to anyone who may have gotten tired of hitting the snooze button.
Anne Lamott
Image
My natural tendency is to complicate everything--and then to spray words and ideas onto everything afterwards. I've had to develop the habit of keeping things simple.
Anne Lamott
Image
[Her] work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things -- a mother, a lover, a listener, a nurturer -- and you could also be critically astute and radical and have a minority opinion that was profoundly moral.
Anne Lamott
Image
I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.
Anne Lamott
Image
Left to my own devices, my first inclination is to mess in other people's lives. I secretly believe my whole family, and really the whole world, is my responsibility.
Anne Lamott
Image
I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.
Anne Lamott
Image
The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.
Anne Lamott
Image
Now she and I sit together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time when we both to go heaven, we should try to get chairs next to each other, close to the dessert table.
Anne Lamott
Image
I am a terrible and lazy Christian. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. I just skip about a third of it. I love the parts I love so much, but I find a lot of it just appalling. When a right-wing person quotes a passage in order to attack and stigmatize another person--or group of people--I just roll my eyes.
Anne Lamott
Image
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
Anne Lamott
Image
My dad taught me that to be a writer is a decision and a habit. It's not anything lofty, and it doesn't have that much to do with inspiration. You have to develop the habit of being a certain way with yourself. You do it at the debt of honor.
Anne Lamott
Image
All I know is that after 10 years of being sober, with huge support to express my pain and anger and shadow, the grief and tears didn’t wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet. They brought me home, to me, to the truth of me.
Anne Lamott
Image
You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.
Anne Lamott
Image
I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.
Anne Lamott
Image
I've always understood that meditation had to be part of - or was part of the natural path and so I've always sort of dabbled in it.
Anne Lamott
Image
I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud, and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful, but I'm annoying, and a phony.
Anne Lamott
Image
The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.
Anne Lamott
Image
The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.
Anne Lamott