Great Writing Quotes by Author Annie Dillard

Write as if you were dying.

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.

Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.

The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

… (always) assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite?

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