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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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Exlpore more Writing quotes
"Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists."
"A true piece of writing sets you free."
"Through writing, an author opens the window of his heart through which a reader can see the inner self of the author."
"Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it."
"What is your advice to young writers? "Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard
"Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let it rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself."
"You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades."
"Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."
"The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days."
"Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood."
"Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit."
"Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them."
"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 world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes."
"There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable."
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