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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.

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
World
Small
Recalling
Point
Colorless
Else
Deprivation
Littles
Sensory
Little
Surprise
Many
Writers
Real
Writer
Life
Rooms

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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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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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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
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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?
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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