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My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don't wait for inspiration.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Time
Habit
Inspiration
Taught
Waiting
Father
Writing
Every
Develop
Really
Wait

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?
Anne Lamott
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I became a Christian before I got sober. So I was a drunk, bulimic Christian.
Anne Lamott
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When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.
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I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty-five years, that there's something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help, Thanks, Wow.
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We're out there somewhere between the known and the unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look.
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Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California).
Anne Lamott
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These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.
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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Frederick Buechner is one of my favorite writers. The Eyes of the Heart is beautiful and wise, full of insight, charm, and tenderness.
Anne Lamott
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Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.
Anne Lamott
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Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.
Anne Lamott
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Her purse was a weight, ballast it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.
Anne Lamott
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Grief is just so scary.... If we finally begin to cry all those suppressed tears, they will surely wash us away like the Mississippi River. That's what our parents told us. We got sent to our rooms for having huge feelings. In my family, if you cried or got angry, you didn't get dinner.
Anne Lamott
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Certainty is missing the point entirely.
Anne Lamott
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The reason 'help' is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you're in despair, you're teachable.
Anne Lamott
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Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.
Anne Lamott
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I'm one of those religious people who are afraid of everything. I'm instantly worried about everything that could go wrong.
Anne Lamott
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It feels like I'm babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.
Anne Lamott
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[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
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Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.
Anne Lamott