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Plot springs from character... I've always sort of believed that these people inside me- these characters- know who they are and what they're about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don't type.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Happens
Spring
Character
Characters
Need
Paper
Needs
Type
Writing
Inside
Always
Sort
Springs
People
Help
Plot
Helping
Believed

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.
Anne Lamott
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...music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way.
Anne Lamott
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And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about.
Anne Lamott
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I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this.
Anne Lamott
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Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.
Anne Lamott
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Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.
Anne Lamott
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I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under.
Anne Lamott
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You have to be a warrior and say, Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine. (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)
Anne Lamott
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A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.
Anne Lamott
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When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.
Anne Lamott
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Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.
Anne Lamott
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There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure.
Anne Lamott
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I'm not going to change the way people think about me, but I can say you know what? I'm not going to carry that in my backpack.
Anne Lamott
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Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.
Anne Lamott
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I have a giant ego and terrible self-esteem, so I need to hit the re-set button fairly regularly - to get into presence, and humility, and being right-sized.
Anne Lamott
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When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.
Anne Lamott
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The stuff I write about is pretty universal, the things my closest friends and I talk about - our anxiety about being here on this scary planet, during these scary times, as vulnerable as kittens, having lost so many people I couldn't live without.
Anne Lamott
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The difference between a writer who toughs it out and one who doesn't is that you push through the parts where you know that you've just written seven pages when all you're looking for is one paragraph.
Anne Lamott
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Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.
Anne Lamott
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They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.
Anne Lamott