quotations from a wise woman:

"Process is nothing; erase your tracks.  The path is not hte work.  I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope the birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back."

"So it is that a writer writes many books.  In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened."

"Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating.  It is sufficientyly difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence.  It is life at its most free.  The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.... A shoe saleseman ... is nevertheless working usefully.  Further, if the shoe salesman fails to appear one morning, someone will notice and miss him.  Your manuscript, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not.  There are many manuscripts already—worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones.  If you believed Paradise Lost to be excellent, would you buy it?  Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?"

"Where next?  I knew where next.  It was within my possibilities.  If only I could concentrate.  I must quit.  I was too young to be living at a desk.  Many fine people were out there living, people whose consciences permitted them to sleep at night despite their not having written a decent sentence that day, or ever."



– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life