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"The writing that so thrills and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing right next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else."
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"Always seek beauty to create a beautiful life."

"For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle."

"I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across-not to just depict life-or criticize it-but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way."

"Make movies my friend " make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul."

"My poems are only bits of scratchingon the floor of acage."

"A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart."

"For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations."

"Some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ..."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard


"Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles."


"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."


"Somewhere and I can't find where I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest 'If I did not know about God and sin would I go to hell?' 'No' said the priest 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why ' asked the Eskimo earnestly 'did you tell me?'"


"Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world."


"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."
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