David Perell interviewed the author Anne Lamott (29 April 2026).
“I have a priest friend, who actually just passed, an old man named Terry Richie. And he said ‘the point is not to try harder, it’s to resist less.’“
“It’s not accumulating more experiences, because that puts more pressure on you. It’s about paying better attention.”
“So it’s not about trying to get it to happen or jiggle it out of the universe. It’s about awareness. It’s about agreeing to just become aware and to start noticing. To notice a certain color. I could describe your orchids. I could describe the slightly greenish yellow inside the center of your orchid. And then I could use that to describe somebody’s eyes later. But I just notice it.”
“The writer’s job is to pay attention to life as it tromps by… It’s about putting on a better pair of glasses and waking up… and you start paying attention to people’s faces, to people’s eyes, to the landscape, to the sky, and the ground beneath you.”
“And it’s all what we meet our writer self with. And we meet it half way by noticing.”
“So I don’t say fill up with more experiences or more friends or anything like that. You start just really paying attention.”
Anne Lamott is the author of many books including:
- Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1995)
- Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences
co-authored with her husband Neal Allen (2026)
