Quotes from Anne Lamott

I started to cry then, and I cried for a long time without making much noise. I cried and cried like a little kid.

Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning-- sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.

good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep

The good news is that if you don't seal up your heart with caulking compound, and instead stay permeable, people stay alive inside you, and maybe outside you, too, forever. This

You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving has to be its own reward.

To paraphrase Paul Tillich, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.

I let my mind wander.

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

So while I do not expect to get over much, I know that my motley, beloved friends and I have only a short time together left on this merry-go-round, as it spins around the sun, rises and falls. At the same time, these friends are all sort of a marvelous mess: perfect and neurotic, driven and gentle, self-centered and crazily generous, fully alive and probably on their way out. They are chipped and slightly faded works of art, and they are the exact horse I've longed for, all my life.

We need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here - and, by extension, what we're supposed to be writing.

Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.

In the face of everything, we slowly come through.

inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California).

Everyone was on God's payroll, whether they knew it or not.

Pretending that things are nicely boxed up and put away robs us of great riches.

that the dream must be vivid and continuous.

they got to be so conceited because they were Catholics.

Living on earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

Paul of Tarsus, for instance. Putting aside the little problem with all the people he had killed, he was annoying, sexist, stuffy, and theoretical. He was not a great storyteller like the Gospel writers. He often got preachy, and his message was frequently about trying to be more stoic, with dogmatic Shape up and Shame on you talks.

I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.

Writer's block is going to happen to you. You will read what little you've written lately and see with absolute clarity that it is total dog shit.

I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it, and I don't think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect.

This is our goal as writers, I think: to help others have this sense of wonder, of seeing things anew, things that catch us off-guard, that break in our small bordered worlds. When this happens everything feels more spacious.