top of page

"In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Creativity quotes

"I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow."

"Now is not the time for bigots and racists. No time for sexists and homophobes. Now, more than ever, is the time for ARTISTS. It's time for us to rise above and to create. To show humanity. To spread hope. We must prevent society from destroying itself, from losing its way. Now is the time for love."

"Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context."

"You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket."

"As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don't necessarily write down what I'm thinking; it's just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths."

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

"I like music," she said slowly, "because when I hear it, I . . . I lose myself within myself, if that makes any sense. I become empty and full all at once, and I can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When I play. I'm not . . . for once, I'm not destroying, I'm creating."

"Never to rush something I was creating, but instead let it come into being as if it had a soul of it's own."

"A poet is someone who never forgets they were born naked."

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard


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


"Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark."


"There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary a batch of technical skills and equipment and perhaps a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things of their complexity fascination and unexpectedness."


"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 in midair."


"Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?"


"Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet."


"You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it."


"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 in midair."


"Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them."
bottom of page