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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

Annie Dillard

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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Doe
Spinning
States
Internals
Firsts
Internal
First
Peculiar
Writing
Requires
Life
Ordinary
Writer
Induce
State
Draft

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
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Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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We still and always want waking.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
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At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
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Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
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Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
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Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
Annie Dillard
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I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.
Annie Dillard
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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
Annie Dillard
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Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.
Annie Dillard
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Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood aim for the chopping block.
Annie Dillard