"If you can bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.  What a miracle 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 help us understand who we are and how we are to behave.  They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.  They are full of all the things that you don't get in real life - wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat.  And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention.  An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift.  My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean.  Aren't you? I ask."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"Writing can give you what having a baby can give you:  it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"She behaved as if there had always been the One Great Leaving and each iteration of it brought the same welling up.  A love that big could only create havoc, and I hurried out of her arms, ashamed to be the one who could stir her up like that."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are.  They deserve respect.  If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead."
-The Real Thing: A Play by Tom Stoppard

"Far from being intimidated by her accomplished male companions, she took heart from the idea that in becoming an author she was living up to her literary heritage."
-Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon

"It's lovely when writers I like like each other."
-Among Others by Jo Walton