Quote

If you are hoping to find your self-worth and fulfillment in other peoples' opinion of your writing, you will never find it.

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
Peoples
Fulfillment
Worth
Opinion
Find
Self
Writing
Never
Hoping

More quotes by Anne Lamott

Image
These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.
Anne Lamott
Image
Presents can make up for some of the disappointments that life doles out, such as it makes almost no sense and is coming to an end more quickly than ever.
Anne Lamott
Image
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
Anne Lamott
Image
Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation.
Anne Lamott
Image
I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me.
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
I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.
Anne Lamott
Image
Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.
Anne Lamott
Image
Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
Anne Lamott
Image
I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.
Anne Lamott
Image
Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.
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
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
Image
Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.
Anne Lamott
Image
How do you begin? The answer is simple: you decide to.
Anne Lamott
Image
Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you’ve been able to muster. But if you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know-people who are, in other words, not you.
Anne Lamott
Image
You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.
Anne Lamott
Image
The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.
Anne Lamott
Image
I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is.
Anne Lamott
Image
I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and save the world. You sent money to the Red Cross, you registered people to vote, you marched in rallies, stood in vigils, picked up litter.
Anne Lamott