Annie Dillard

Much has been written about the life of the mind.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.

The writer studies literature, not the world.

'Fecundity' is an ugly word for an ugly subject. It is ugly, at least, in the eggy animal world. I don't think it is for plants.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.

I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.

Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.

Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

Write about winter in the summer.

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.