Writing allows you to explore and rewards paying attention.

Put a little bit down on paper every day, and read all the great books and plays.

Be bold and original and let yourself make mistakes.

I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist.

All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging.

…when I read Catcher in the Rye for the first time and knew what it was like to have someone speak for me, to close a book with a sense of both triumph and relief, one lonely isolated social animal finally making contact.

He could take major events or small episodes from daily life and shade or exaggerate things in such a way as to capture their shape and substance, capture what life felt like in the society which he and his friends lived and worked and bred.

“Do it every day for a while”, my father kept saying, “Do it as you would scales on a piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things”

Lamott wrote every night for an hour or more in coffeehouses with a notepad and pen. And little snippets between teaching tennis and cleaning houses. Two ideas here - consistency and adaptability. Being able to write on a schedule + recognizing scraps of time that can be productive.

Lamott was observant - taking notes on people, writing about her family from memory. The funny stuff, her state of mind etc. All grist for the mill.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.

The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

good writing is about telling the truth

Write about your childhood as truthfully as you can.

You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.

You hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk.

You are learning what you aren’t writing, and this is helping you to find out what you are writing.

Becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.

Short assignments: all I have to do is write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being.

E. L. Doctorow - “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as dar as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

We were at my family cabin in Bolians, and [my brother] was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books of birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”

Awareness if learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage.

Writing a first draft is very much like watching a polaroid develop. You can’t - and in fact, you’re not supposed to - know exactly how the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.

Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time. As soon as you start protecting your characters from the ramifications of their less-than-lofty behavior, your story will start to feel flat and pointless, just like in real life.

One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can’t.

We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

You don’t get to sit next to your readers and explain little things you left out, or fill in details that would have made the action more interesting or believable. The material has got to work on its own.

The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity. The other, of course, if the river.

Everyone I know flails around, kvetching and growing despondent, on the way to finding a plot and structure that work.

I am learning to slowly bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place of friendly detachment towards myself, so I can look out at the world and see all those other things with respect.

The purpose of most great writing seems to be to reveal in an ethical light who we are.

To be a great writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care…to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it.

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it it time to kick in.

“The Gulf Stream will flow through a straw provided the straw is aligned to the Gulf Stream, and not at cross purposes with it.”

Dealing with jealousy: (a) getting older (b) talking about it until the fever breaks (c) using it as material

Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and to not sweat the small things.

I’ll look through my index cards. I try to see if there’s a short assignment on any of them that will get me writing again.

Truth is a hard apple to catch and it is a hard apple to throw.