Annie Dillard
The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.Collection: Creative
I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.Collection: Nice
I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.Collection: Years
I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.Collection: World
Your feelings are none of your business.Collection: Feelings
Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course; living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?Collection: Children
Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.Collection: Book
About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.Collection: Stars
If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.Collection: Understanding
Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.Collection: Poet
Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?Collection: World
Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.Collection: Writing
For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.Collection: Cities
Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.Collection: Christmas
Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?Collection: Nature
Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.Collection: Book
What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. ... What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.Collection: Book
In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.Collection: Generations
You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.Collection: Thinking
Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.Collection: Each Day
A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.Collection: Stars
Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.Collection: Hands
You can’t test courage cautiously.Collection: Courage
When I first read the words ‘introvert’ and ‘extrovert’ when I was 10, I thought I was both.Collection: Firsts
I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I’m terrified that I’ll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.Collection: Reading