Quotes by Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Explore a curated collection of 22 quotes by Annie Dillard, The Writing Life. Discover timeless wisdom, insightful thoughts, and memorable words that have inspired readers around the world. Browse through the gallery below and click on any quote to read more.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer i — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sa — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doi — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
One of the few things I know about writing is this:spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, right away, every time. Do — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprent — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dr — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ign — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastl — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all you — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper. — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. T — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? and, Can I do it? Every book has an intrinsic im — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each othe — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life