Roxanne Taillefer

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life: The Classic Essay Collection on the Creative Process

“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our heats? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life: The Classic Essay Collection on the Creative Process

“I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life: The Classic Essay Collection on the Creative Process