"Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affi...
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
~ Annie Dillard ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
More Annie Dillard quotes
"I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented ...
"All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a ma...
"On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
"For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
"You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.
"It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. ...
"At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. ...
"We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the li...
"Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? ...
"Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at ...
"Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in exper...
"Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk i...
"If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets ...
"The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indul...