A Quote by Annie Dillard

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, & it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination’s vision, & the imagination’s hearing—& the moral sense, & the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks & exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

Annie Dillard

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Anyone Anyone Else Appeals Band Barely Blood Dancing Else Gets Going Good Hearing Imagination Intellect Life Literature Many Mere Moral Next Only People Prefer Rocks Sense Senses Smells Thrills Vision Weak Were Word Writing Written Written Word Your

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Annie Dillard
American - Author
Born: April 30, 1945

Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere .

Charles Sanders Peirce

Great fiction can often present moral messages with greater power and clarity than instructional writing - since literature, after all, penetrates not just the intellect, but the imagination.

Charles Colson

Writing objects to the lie that life is small. Writing is a cell of energy. Writing defines itself. Writing draws its viewer in for longer than an instant. Writing exhibits boldness. Writing restores power to exalt, unnerve, shock, and transform us. Writing does not imitate life, it anticipates life.

Jeanette Winterson

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

Ayana Mathis

I like writing with people. I think the times that I've closed myself off to not writing with people, I haven't gotten the best product because I haven't had anyone to go back and forth with and really discuss what's going on in my life, what's going on in their life. It's so important to have that connection.

Noah Cyrus

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

Robert Bringhurst

My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?

Barbara Corcoran

The funny thing about writing is, although you are writing about an experience which only you have had, you are trying to welcome other people into it, and there are ways I think of doing this, and one of them is through the senses, through the sounds and the smells.

Ronald Frame

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing - none of that is writing. Writing is writing. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

You honor your writing space by recovering, if you are an addict. You honor your writing space by becoming an anxiety expert, a real pro at mindfulness and personal calming. You honor your writing space by affirming that you matter, that your writing life matters, and that your current writing project matters. You honor your writing space by entering it with this mantra: “I am ready to work.” You enter, grow quiet, and vanish into your writing.

Eric Maisel

Who can keep us from recreating our life as we would like it to be-as it could, and should be? No one but ourselves can keep us from being artists, rather than marching forward like mere consumers, corporate robots, sheep. No one but ourselves can keep us from dancing with life instead of goose-stepping. In every moment recognizing our own creative imagination, the living picture we paint on the canvas of our lives. Everything is imagination. And imagination is freedom, but it can also be conditioning, bondage.

Surya Das

Something I found while writing 'Alice & Oliver' - a book that is unquestionably a work of fiction, but which also borrows details from my own life - is that writing the truth often requires invention and imagination.

Charles Bock

I guess when I first started writing music, I really had no idea if anyone was ever going to hear what I was writing and almost no intention of people hearing it. So, it was kind of this journal. It was pretty unfiltered.

Tyler Joseph

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

Harlan Coben

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

Said Sayrafiezadeh

Actually, I've taught creative writing in Turkey, at an English language university, where the students were native Turkish speakers, but they were writing their essays in English, and they were very interesting - even the sense of structure, the conventions of writing, the different styles of writing.

Elif Batuman

A Quote by Annie Dillard

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