How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver. (27.2)
Yeah, writing practically sounds like giving blood to the Red Cross. But Lamott has a serious point. In a way, you're giving away something of yourself when you write; that's what makes other people want to read it. Okay, we sound a bit like Hallmark here, but it's kind of true, too.
Quote #5
Interviewers ask famous writers why they write, and it was (if I remember correctly) the poet John Ashbery who answered, "Because I want to." Flannery O'Connor answered, "Because I'm good at it," and when the occasional interviewer asks me, I quote them both. Then I add that other than writing, I am completely unemployable. But really, secretly, when I'm not being smart-alecky, it's because I want to and I'm good at it. (Introduction.52)
Maybe this isn't a bad test for why you should write. Do you want to? Are you good at it? Those may be the best reasons. "I want to be famous" and "I want to make moolah" probably won't get you too far.
Quote #6
I always mention a scene from the movie Chariots of Fire in which, as I remember it, the Scottish runner, Eric Liddell, who is the hero, is walking along with his missionary sister on a gorgeous heathery hillside in Scotland. She is nagging him to give up training for the Olympics and to get back to doing his missionary work at their church's mission in China. And he replies that he wants to go to China because he feels it is God's will for him, but that first he is going to train with all of his heart, because God also made him very, very fast. So God made some of us fast in this area of working with words, and he gave us the gift of loving to read with the same kind of passion with which we love nature. (Introduction.52-53)
This is a great story for Lamott to tell here because on the one hand, it's about talent and duty, but on the other, it's also about what fills someone with joy. Writing is about those things, too.