Anne Lamott Quotes

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience.

Whatever is about you that is translated into your art, that's gonna keep you completly original and fresh and I just think that, that's just the best advice I can give, to an artist creatively.

It is the glory and good of Art, That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.

I wanted to make the album I always needed to make. I had to say the things I never could.

Do stuff that is true to your own experiences.

You should have something to say, an idea you want to get out, and if you don't, just get out of the way, 'cause there's so many great musicians and writers that are in the queue.

Writing is about bringing something from inside you that you're trying to say, and not just trying to say something to please someone else.

I write because I have authority from life to do so.

Your obligation as writers is to distinguish yourself. … The ultimate result should be a book that you write that no one else could have written.

As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination.

I know definitive points in my life and in relationships because of my songs. I write my music so that I'll never be bored of it.

If it’s a pure expression of yourself no matter what it is or what medium, it’s going to shine. It’s going to resonate. You could look inside of yourself and you could have a canvas and you could paint a dot in it, but if that is where your creative purpose is taking you then it needs to be that dot.

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.

I've always been the audience that I wanted to reach, so I write for myself.

It's a sort of philosophy you cook up for yourself. You probably write things the same as everybody else, but it's your own personal way of saying things.

Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?

There's enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probaby, each of them, a hundred records, and never be repeated. There's enough songs. Unless someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story.

It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless - abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mindYou really have to make a resolution to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.

Only write from your own passion, your own truth. That's the only thing you really know about, and anything else leads you away from the pulse.

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.

Write what you would love to read. Finish what you begin to write. Your voice is uniquely yours and we are all waiting to hear it.

You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Don't write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what's in your heart.

I find it relatively easy to keep my clothes on because I don't really feel like taking them off. It's not an urge I have. For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is. That's putting myself out there, maybe even more than taking my shirt off.