Literary Birthday – 30 April – Annie Dillard

Happy Birthday, Annie Dillard, born on 30 April 1945.

Annie Dillard Quotes On Writing

1. All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
2. At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
3. Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
4. I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
5. One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. 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.
6. Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all.
7. 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.
8. It is no less difficult to write a sentence in a recipe than sentences in Moby Dick. So you might as well write Moby Dick.
9. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
10. If you’re going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.

Annie Dillard is an American poet, essayist, and novelist known for her intensely poetic and precise prose. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for her collection of narrative essays, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She has also written a book on writing, The Writing Life, and a memoir An American Childhood. Her latest work of fiction is a short novel, The Maytrees. The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New was released in 2016.She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Dillard received the National Humanities Medal from U.S. Pres. Barack Obama in 2015.

Source for Image: Photo by Phyllis Rose, GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annie-dillard.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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