Annie Dillard, The Writing Life Quotes

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.

Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.

In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said "It is the trade entering his body.