Quote

There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open 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
Walks
Open
Help
Helping
Find
Writing
Door
Doors
Walk

More quotes by Anne Lamott

Image
Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams - what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred - I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then 15 years later, I even started to make real money.
Anne Lamott
Image
Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.
Anne Lamott
Image
... one of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people. [p. 65]
Anne Lamott
Image
Why couldn't Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hershey's Kisses in bed?
Anne Lamott
Image
If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don't have a very interesting problem.
Anne Lamott
Image
There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.
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
Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it.
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
The earth is rocky and full of roots it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.
Anne Lamott
Image
Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.
Anne Lamott
Image
I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead.
Anne Lamott
Image
No is a complete sentence.
Anne Lamott
Image
We want a sense that an important character, like a narrator, is reliable. We want to believe that a character is not playing ages or being coy or being manipulative, but is telling the truth to the best of his or her ability...We do not wish to be crudely manipulated...We want to be massaged by a masseur, not whapped by a carpet beater.
Anne Lamott
Image
I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.
Anne Lamott
Image
We're out there somewhere between the known and the unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look.
Anne Lamott
Image
Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
Anne Lamott
Image
Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts.
Anne Lamott
Image
Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.
Anne Lamott
Image
Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.
Anne Lamott