“I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is....”
0 likes
Author detail
A novelist and writer of non-fiction, Anne Lamott was born in San Francisco in 1954. She wrote for the newspaper at Goucher College for the two years she attended. She wrote her first novel, *Hard Laughter* for her father after he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Howard Freeman's term "particularism" is aptly applied to her narrative nonfiction. Lamott draws on her own life and experiences in her writing, covering topics such as alcoholism, depression, being a single mother, Christianity, and the intersection between them.
Quotes
Showing 41-60 of 160
“I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is....”
0 likes
“Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.”
“Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.”
“It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently-that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is...”
“I realized I was going to get through this disappointing service, and anyway, you have to be somewhere: better here, where I have heard truth spoken so often, than, say, at the DMV, or home...”
“Writing like this is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.”
0 likes
“As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don't know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all.”
“...It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.”
“Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.”
0 likes
“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, wor...”
“No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I feel like you pay all day for...”
0 likes
“For me, Jesus is my cleft in the rock. He is my safest friend, my safe totally loving accepting big brother.”
0 likes
“I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.”
0 likes
“Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost - his or her wildest, most messed-up children - the way you'd ache and love a screwed-up rebel da...”
0 likes
“I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights,...”
0 likes
“When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with...”
0 likes
“I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.”
0 likes
“I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I sta...”
0 likes
“Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking...”
0 likes
“I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles; I...”
0 likes