Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Quotes

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Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to ...

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?" 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. So you sit down at, say, nine every morni...

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childho...

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books...

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselv...

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen t...

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic w...

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

If you don't believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth's: that awareness is 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...

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

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.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness m...

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination...

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

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 i...

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. 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. You wait and watch and...

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life