Quote

My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.

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
Along
Writer
Experience
Write
Find
Paragraph
Writing
Eight
Really
Pages
Seven

More quotes by Anne Lamott

Image
My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.
Anne Lamott
Image
Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.
Anne Lamott
Image
Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.
Anne Lamott
Image
It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.
Anne Lamott
Image
This is our goal as writers, I think to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.
Anne Lamott
Image
When faced with a crisis, do three things: breathe, pray and be kind.
Anne Lamott
Image
And my fear of failure has been lifelong and deep. If you are what you do- and I think my parents may have accidentally given me this idea- and you do poorly, what then? It’s over you’re wiped out. All those prophecies you heard in the dark have come true, and people can see the real you, see what a schmendrick you are, what a fraud.
Anne Lamott
Image
Radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air.
Anne Lamott
Image
... everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. [p. 110]
Anne Lamott
Image
What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.
Anne Lamott
Image
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. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.
Anne Lamott
Image
I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.
Anne Lamott
Image
You fall so deeply in love with your grandbaby. It's so so so much easier than being a parent, because you really don't have much responsibility. And just when you are at the end of your rope with exhaustion, the parents take the baby away. So it's the best of both worlds.
Anne Lamott
Image
Sam said to me the other day, I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops, and this is the exact same way in which I love him.
Anne Lamott
Image
I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice.
Anne Lamott
Image
All criticism hurts me. I'm so in the wrong business.
Anne Lamott
Image
I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother's Day. I didn't want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some annual display of gratitude that you have to grit your teeth and endure.
Anne Lamott
Image
It was simple reality - most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock - great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us.
Anne Lamott
Image
I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family's life.
Anne Lamott
Image
Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one.
Anne Lamott