By Annie Dillard
Quotes
On throwing away early work:
A painting covers its tracks. Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left. The latest version of a literary work begins somewhere in the work’s middle, and hardens toward the end. The earlier version remains lumpishly on the left; the work’s beginning greets the reader with the wrong hand. In those early pages and chapters anyone may find bold leaps to nowhere, read the brave beginnings of dropped themes, hear a tone since abandoned, discover blind alleys, track red herrings, and laboriously learn a setting now false.
The work is not the vision itself, certainly. It is not the vision filled in, as if it had been a colouring book. It is not the vision reproduced in time; that were impossible. It is rather a simulacrum and a replacement. It is a golem.
On rest:
Octavio Paz cites the example of “Saint-Pol Roux, who used to hang the inscription ‘The poet is working’ from his door while he slept”
On spending time wisely:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim.
On learning to write:
Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.
The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?"
"Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know… Do you like sentences?”
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I liked sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of paint”
On being in the rut:
“You asked how my work is going.” he said. “That’s how it’s going. The current’s got me. Feels like I’m about in the middle of the channel now. I just keep at it. I just keep hoping the tide will turn and bring me in.”
Just beautiful:
Each sentence hung over an abyssal ocean of sky which held all possibilities, as well as the possibility of nothing.