YouSaid · the spoken record

Anne Lamott

lines on the record: 114
first: 2021-07-14
most recent: 2021-07-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Whatever you think of God, you know, good, orderly direction or group of drunks or grace over drama or whatever that life tends and tilts towards the good and that we're cared for all evidence to the contrary every step of the way we really are. We're surrounded. Emily Dickenson said that hope causes the good to make itself apparent and we're surrounded by that good and we're safe. That's why I tell my Sunday school kids you are loved and you are safe. So that's what I'd like to leave everyone with.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To remember that I'm not in charge of much, except for maybe helping the animals get the cans of cat food and dog food open every night because they have no possible thumbs. But I just know that”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This woman in my recovery community about 15 years ago had a very severe oral cancer. She'd had to have part of her jaw removed and part of her tongue so she had a really dramatic speech impediment. She did the chemo on the radiation. She was fine. She was in remission for almost 10 years. And then it came back. So she shared at group level that she was going to have to do it all over again, maybe have a bit more jaw removed and have chemo and radiation. Everybody just was so panic stricken and uncomfortable about it. They started doing what you do, which is saying, oh, my beautician's son had that same thing and he's fine now. And oh, this and oh that. And oh, oxygen therapy. And she just waved it away like it was cigarette smoke. And she said, you know what? God's got it. And so I got that actually written on an engraved on a gold coin that I wear around my neck that I touch constantly.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure. I would like to tell one quick story if I might. People who both believe in a higher power and people who believe in goodness and who believe that there is some sort of loving energy in this world that bats last, I would call it grace, but”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where you begin to understand he probably is going to die. It's about all of life. It's about life and death and despair and renewal and crisis and death and resurrection and new life and people and food. And it's about an hour and a half and it's hallucinatory and it changes you on a molecular level. I am not making that up.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My favorite movies. You know, there's some movie I've made Sam and my grandchild watch that changed my life. It's called Baba Z, the Persian movie. Do you see it from It's Iranian? The second name is AZIZ, but it's like B A B apostrophe AB A Z I Z. And it's about, you know, it's the great classic theme of a travel log with a very young girl. And yeah, it's. The subtitle is The Prince That Contemplated His Soul, and it's a movie within a movie about a very little girl taking her extremely aged grandfather to a festival of holy men.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the chief kind of does these expressions and these faces, and he finally takes a rope and he cuts this rope that holds the bag over Robert De Niro's back. And Robert De Niro begins to sob and they begin to laugh and cry together and he buries himself into the chief's neck. And it is one of the most profound moments I've ever seen in my life. You know how we will not let go of the stuff, the weaponry, and the stuff that gave us the illusion of power, the illusion of control and domination. We just won't let it go. It's so beautiful. There's many movies. I mean, I love the godfather and I love, I've completely turned on Woody Allen, so I don't watch him with any pleasure anymore. But up until about 25 years ago, I had seen all of his movies five and ten times. What are your favorite? What's your answer to that question?”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jeremy Irons runs a mission in the rainforest below these falls where a tribe is being decimated. And Robert De Niro is a soldier and he has killed a bunch of people. And he ends up at the mission and he's got this huge bag of weapons and everything that has ever defined him. He and Jeremy Irons and another couple of the brothers are climbing up past the falls to where the tribe is that needs so much help. And Robert De Niro, it's a scene, it's five minutes. It's nothing. He ends up talking to the chief and the chief wants him to drop the bag of weapons and he's not going to. They brought him to this point. He's exiled. He's ashamed. He's suicidal. It's the darkest, darkest place it could ever be, but he won't let go of the weapons that brought him to this place. And it's nonverbal. They don't speak the same language.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love movies more almost more than anything. You know, it's funny there's a scene in the movie The Mission with Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons, which most people didn't see except for the, they know the soundtrack by Ennio. What's his name? Marisconi or something I-O. Anyway, it's called The Mission. And in it.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I possibly could. Before we go, though, I want to give you a writing prayer because I do have a when I write, especially when I'm writing novels, which are hard. That's why I tell all my students I pray, help me get out of the way to write what wants to be written. Because I believe the material and the characters, as I said, know who and what they are So help me get out of the way to write what wants to be written inside me.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got there. And so I kind of had that as it was soul and hope in the time of Trump and the UN climate change papers. And so I felt that we were very, very much had trends gone from the desk of climate disaster to the night of a lot of craziness and brutality and hopelessness, but the dawn always arrives. And so I wanted to be as fearless as I could be writing about all three of those stages, but just helping people remember the dawn always comes, you know, and that, and oh, I'd heard something, Tim I thought was beautiful, which was that twilight refers to dusk and dawn. Twilight is when the light is fading and becoming night, and twilight is when the night is fading and becoming dawn. And so I wanted to write these stories that were as real as possible, but that were as hopeful. real.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, my last book, the book before this, was called Almost Everything Thoughts on Hope, so I've been traveling around the world to the country, to bookstores and theaters talking about hope, and the people in my audience just did not feel a lot of hope. They felt sad and scared. They felt very worried about Trump and the UN climate change papers had come out that were just devastating where the climate scientists didn't really feel we could turn this around. And so I really felt that as a as a driving dream of mine to be able to tell real stories from my own life and others that would help people realize how hard things could be, but how good we are at heart. And so I always love this novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez called Love in the Time of Cholera. You probably read that in college. I thought it was just as good as, oh my God, my mind went blank. Never mind.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tonight, come eat with us. And so you've got all these parts of me that I have cut off. I welcome back on my path to wholeness. You know in the new book a lot of it is about soul, and maybe all of these people are a part of what I would dare to call soul, that my Sunday school kids saw as the innermost Russian nesting doll. One of my Sunday school kids said he thought it was a silvery snow globe in the very center of me, or like a kiosk from which the world troops by and I say hi to people and wave. And so maybe in the very center of me there's not the person my parents wanted me to be or who I pretend to be or who everybody thinks I am. But it's this kind of hodgepodgey thing that's too big for one set of clothes and it's all the beauty and all the cork and all of the damage and all of the everything. And it was exactly as it was meant to be. It's like I can push back my sleeves and live from there now.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To chain, we're having Minestrone tonight come eat with us. So I had like Blanche Dubois, Donald Trump, Jane, and but I also have these incredible like my hero. I found my inner Amelia Earhart and I found that for married couples it was kind of threatening that I've gone so many places. I've gone so far in my career. I've traveled the world. I've done things that might have been hard if you were married and that I was so brave to do that they might not have felt brave enough to do. And so I found Amelia Earhart and I would kind of tamp it down so it didn't make other people feel bad about their own accomplishments. And I thought, no, I don't know how long I'm going to live, but I'm not going to pretend that I don't have this pioneering, crazily brave woman inside of me. And so I would say to Amelia Earhart, we're having Portuguese wedding soup.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With us and to make friends with it. And you know, this is terrible. It's probably the worst thing I've ever said on the air. But about four months ago, no, it's more than that, but there was a fire in a place in a town where I hate somebody. I hate an entire family. Oh, I can't even believe I'm saying this, but I kind of thought good. I thought good. And I caught myself and actually laughed out loud. And I thought, oh my God. And then I realized it was my inner maternal grandmother whose name was Jane. She was my mother's grandmother and they grew up on the docks of Liverpool. They were poor. The husband was a dock worker. He died when my mom and her twin sister were sick. And her mother who was named Jane was this cold, gimlet-eyed person who just hated people and who wanted bad things to happen to people. It was my inner Jane. And you know what?”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because that's been very, very important for me. And the inner Donald Trump is a part of that horrible bonnie. Help me start welcoming these people that I try, these parts of myself that I cannot believe are part of me, that I can't stand, that I recoil from. And she had me start welcoming them to the table, to where we're going to have soup tonight. And it would be like Blanche Dubois, you know, that my inner blanched dubois would be somebody who is a predator and who preys on people because she has zero self-esteem, zero sense of self, and she uses her feminine wiles and her victim to lure people in and to do for her what she can't do for herself and to elevate her sense of self. And Donald Trump, this person, this me, who really is such an asshole. And to say, you know what? You're a part of me. Come, we're going to have soup. We're going to have potato leek soup tonight.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You never get on the bus with me where we just track, like she doesn't, she wouldn't trash Trump with me and she loathed him. But what she'd see was that incredible miracles and blessings were going to spring from the four years of having Trump and that she would have me put on the good pair of glasses and see what was springing from this. You know, that was going to change the world forever. What was going to change me forever? What she helped me do was to find my own inner Donald Trump, who's bombastic and self-righteous and victimized, and it changed things for me. It really changed Trump for me when I found my own inner Donald Trump. And it's that sort of thing. You see what I mean? That you could call her in rage and judgment. And she just wreck it for you. You call her in superiority. I'll just wreck it for you. But I wanted to add one thing, if you don't mind, when you were talking about the disassociation.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While her real name is Bonnie Allen, and she has been my spiritual mentor since I got into recovery, and she has been with me every step of the way through early sobriety through having a baby without a partner or a scent in the world through Sam's mess and through a baby Sam's baby at 19, through breakups, through custody battles, through poverty. And every step of the way, she just sees so much blessing. And it drives me crazy. And no matter what shape I call her in, which is to say in completely enraged spoiled brat narcissist mode, she says, oh dearest, I'm so glad you called him that you trust me with this. That's why I call her horrible bonnie because it just drives me crazy.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To Bill Wilson, who was one of the craziest people in America at that time, he said, sometimes I think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses. And I think about that almost every day because I can either have the glasses on that are like x-ray glasses where I can just see everything that's wrong with almost everything, really, because I'm good at that. I've made a career of it. Or I can put on the glasses where I feel a lot of compassion for everybody. And I see how hard they're trying. And I see that they got dealt a really shitty hand of cards and that they played at the very best they could. And I see with the better pair of glasses that how much beauty is all around me. It blows me away. And it makes me free and it makes my life much more expansive, but I need to remember in the way I remember is to pray to have the good pair of glasses on.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yellow clown frills and to the little bit of green shoots that somehow I don't know how break through the concrete and to pay attention you know and as a writer you know Henry James said a writer is someone on whom nothing is lost so I pay attention and I get material I scribble it down and I gather like rags for the rag bag guy in my soul which is what you're doing with your writing right now you know you're amassing like these squares to use for a quilt that you're gonna crochet together and some of them are unbleached linen and some are silk or velure or old piece of denim and you you don't don't judge them you you amass them so i pray to pay attention to life as a kind of troops all around me and i'll tell you one thing there was a guy who helped aa get started who was not himself an alcoholic he was a priest since 1935 and he said”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wake up and I pray, I say a prayer every single I wake up and I pray from recovery about just help me keep my sticky fingers off the controls of this spaceship, you know, help me move above. And, you know, I know as sure as I'm sitting here that if I want to have really loving, warm feelings, I need to do really loving warm things. And I can do them for myself. I can put lotion on the parts of my body that I don't love quite as much, let's say, that I wish I'd remembered to go to the gym after I had a baby, but I didn't. 32 years ago. I can do loving things with me. Acts. Take the action and the insight follows. You don't think yourself into having a warm, generous heart. You act your way. You do loving things for other people. And so I pray to have that awareness. I pray to be paying attention to life, you know, all around me, to the golden crown sparrows that migrate through my part of the woods in the fall and to the daffodils that are only here for two months with their crazy orange.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terrifying, and it's the most beautiful thing you've heard, and it's terrifying. We're here to learn, to endure the beams of love. I know you go through this with your girlfriend, that it's scary to be loved. It's scary to be forgiven. It's scary, you know what? It's scary to be accepted as you are. It's just like, what's the catch? I'm sure your family was just fine, but in my family, that never came up. You know, that unconditional love and acceptance of who I was at any given time. It was usually about changing me to be who they really hoped I'd turn out to grow up to be. And so it's so trippy, that just that one line and to practice bearing it, you know, to practice bearing it.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To help, because I was like a flight attendant in my family as I've expressed, but hard for me to ask her. You know, the great poet William Blake said, we're here to learn to endure the beams of love. And I just”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm in hostilities and I'm in the troubles like in Ireland. I'm in the troubles. I think I'm right. I'd rather be right than happy. You know, the Buddhists are always... So I could rather be right, okay? But so, are the great Krishna Murdy said when he was asked where he found spiritual peace and what his message was, he said, I don't mind what happens. You know, and I mind about half of everything that happens. I mind that he said that he doesn't mind what happens. And when I'm there, I need help and the help comes from being in the awareness that I'm in a cold, sheet metal-y place in my heart. And I either need the breath of the Holy Spirit, you know, or I need my best friend to drive around with me and we go get an overpriced cup of chai somewhere and maybe some carrot cake while we're there. And I need help and I deserve it. And I can ask for it. You know, people love, love, love to be there for you. And it's for me, it's so easy to save and fix and to be.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Myself toxic because I'm being acting like I'm feeling like an asshole. I'm in judgment. I'm done with somebody. I'm sick of them. And I feel very cold and uncaring toward them. Or I feel uncaring to a whole swath of humanity or I feel like Tom said, you know, I create, you can tell you've created God in your own image when you hate all the same people he does. When I'm in those states, I create a lot of pain for myself. It becomes kind of metallic and like sheet metal inside of me. You know that cold, hard. When your heart gets cold and hard, it's just so miserable. And again, back to awareness, you know, as soon as you have the awareness that you're there, then you can start to use the tools that you have. And for me, it would be prayer and telling somebody, I'm really stuck right now.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Neil, I get very quiet. And then I weaponize that quietness. And it's very scary. People find it very scary, I hear. But I just stop caring and I get very judgmental. And I'm very, you know, most of the time, I mean, a lot of the time I'm just in judgment because it's so much more interesting than being in kind of peaceful and mosing along and being Ferdinand the bull. It's so fun to be in judgment, especially with a friend, you know, and to be doing gossip and judgment. And so I think that that's fine and that we get to be really human and whatnot. I heard when I first got sober the willingness comes from the pain, you know, and the healing comes from the tools of recovery and of our spiritual life's meditation, prayer, walks, naps. But the willingness comes through the pain, has really stuck with me. And when I have made...”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really my dad's battle cry. He was an atheist. Both my parents were atheists, but he had this ethical moral core. Both my parents said they were very big in civil rights movements. And his thing was just don't be an asshole. Be kind, and they had no spiritual interest at all. In fact, they kind of had a list of who were the craziest religious people of all in order which Christians were crazier than you actually had to be. But their path was about kindness and about service to others. And they did feed the poor. And they did take clothes to the cold. They took warm clothes to people that were cold on the street and they did give away what they could. But when I'm an asshole, it's usually not that flagrant because, you know, I have my appearance together. I've got the surface nicely burnished. And what I do, you can ask salmon.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Film or in books when the depth of our being is revealed, like when Sam and Paul Williams do that interview on Hello Humans, they both weep because they go into the truth of their hearts and souls and their being and their pain and their realness. They do real. And there's nothing more beautiful or touching. You know, the ancient Greeks called God or thought of God as the really real, which is certainly not something that modern-day religion is very interested in. But boy, that really real. You know when you're in the presence of it, and it is a battery pack, and it is. So revitalizing, it's thrilling. It's thrilling to be with the really real, whether it brings tears to your eyes or it makes you stop for a minute and then throw back your head and laugh.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I think it was partly a Star, you know, and that Frida Academy Award and then I could win the Academy Award and I would at least be up on stage when she won the Academy Award. And then I was always broke too. And I thought that it would help me start to make more money, which it actually did. But it was all that kind of stars in my eyes thing. That was the only reason. And then she got really down and dirty and I cried a couple times on film when she That's what I live for is for the depth to be revealed. I'm so sick of the surface stuff and the performance art shit that we parlay most of the time or what Duncan Tressel calls. He says when you first meet me, you meet my bodyguard. And what I live for are...”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know how to say before I answer that, though I was on Rosie O'Donnell's show 20 years ago, and Sam was watching the replay when I got home from filming, and he listened, and then he said very nicely, Mom, do you have a speech impediment? And I've never gotten over that. And I just believe I have a very severe speech impediment. Wait, what was the question again?”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of footage at the place that my mom lived, which was assisted living, independent, and then assisted living. And my mom, she's very befuddled and overweighed and kind of an embarrassment if you were her kid, you know, growing up. It's just so touching. It breaks my heart. I love it so much that that is on film. But mostly, I don't know. You must hate seeing yourself on film. I mean, I think anybody in their right mind does.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was so weird. It was just so weird. I'm kind of not even comfortable talking about it because I don't like having pictures taken of me, let alone movies taken to me, but for about six months Frida Mock, who'd made the Academy Award-winning documentary about Myelin and the Vietnam Memorial Wall in DC, she and her family and a crew followed me from place to place and filmed me in interviews and performances I did on stage and stuff and talking a lot about being a single mother because operating instructions was relatively new. And the one part of it I love, I love the stuff of my kid in it because it's such beautifully filmed home video. But the stuff of my mom is just breaks my heart. It's so lovely. My mom, I've written a lot about her and she was a handful. I had to be her mother from about four years old and she got Alzheimer's and got to not improve the situation. And Frida did a bunch of...”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then what you as the writer do is mess with them. They couldn't survive if they lost their partner, if the partner left them. That's the single most driving force in their life. They couldn't function if they lost their sobriety. That's what causes them to panic. They couldn't stand it if something happened to one of their kids. Lean on them. And then you can keep just closing your eyes and studying them. You know, if you have two characters who hate each other, put them in an elevator that breaks down, you know, and see how they react. Figure out what they can't stand to lose, and then you've got us on the sea. Oh, please don't let that happen. No, don't make that. It's going to happen.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They, in fact, respond? Do they run? Do they put their fingers in their ears and go la la la la la la la la la la la la la la? Do they drink? Only you know, and these people inside of you know, and you can ask them. But the main question is there has to be something at stake in every story that any of us are going to, you know, you're the ancient tribal storyteller and you've said, do you all have a minute? I've got a story to tell you and we sit around you at the fire on the stones and you tell us a story. Now we all love stories about ourselves, right? That's what the tribal storyteller tells. And that's what people like about my story is that because they're the stuff in me that I know is universal. It holds up a mirror to them. And so you say, if nothing happens in your story, if nothing happens to their favorite character, what's the story? It's not a story.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To say with a story you might want to ask yourself what's at stake? Like you're trying to get to know these characters better. You can write it 20 pages. Tim, I'm promising you this. You can write a 20 page short story. You can take out eight pages and then you can send me the 12 and I'll edit it for you. But the thing is that something has to be at stake. So what is you ask yourself and your characters, what do they love most in the world? What are they at risk of losing? If they're not at risk, there's no story there. Could be a child, it could be their sobriety, it could be their life. But what do they stand to lose? So ask them, and you can look at them. Maybe there's two or three main characters, and you ask them, what couldn't you lose? And then you put some pressure on that where that could be at risk. And then you can see how.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Give you themselves and their actions as they trust you to get it right. And so for me, that's why I really believe in the quiet and the silence. And I taught my five-year-olds and this writing workshop, close your eyes. There's this screen on the back of your eyes. Can you see the people? What can you tell me about them? So you can get very quiet and close your eyes and go inward. And then you can ask the people, you can ask the characters, what were you thinking then? What did you feel your choices were? Why were you not willing to just say what was true and that you had the answer they were looking for? You had the missing purse or you had whatever. You can ask them, tell me something about you. And what do you think in this circumstance would be plaguing you?”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I believe that the people and the material know who they are and what they do and that they need to trust that you're a reliable narrator. And this brings me to a whole thing that I could do an hour on, which is that if you grew up around alcoholics or the mentally ill, the first thing you agree To trust yourself as the narrator of your own story and so the material and the characters will in”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hurt people's feelings or any number of reasons why to keep you from writing. But if you have this thing inside of you, if you're not writing, then you're not whole. You have to ask yourself, how alive am I willing to be? And if you're willing to be really alive, then you got to write your truth. You got to tell your stories. You got to do this deep union with self. You have to ask yourself why am I even here? What's the point?”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything you saw, and we can take it out later, or you can make it be happening to another family. That's why fiction's so great. But it all belongs to you. You own it, you get to write it. And we'll figure it all out later. That's what I always tell my sons. Look, we'll figure it all out later because they don't want to hurt their families. I had a student whose mother used to hold his hand over the flame when he had disobeyed her on the stove. But he didn't want to hurt her feelings. She was an elderly woman by then. And I said, make it be the family across the street that you are best friends with. Have their mother be the one. You own it. She should not have done that to you. And you own it and you get to work with it. You get to use it. See, the voice, that critical voice, every step of the way is going to be explaining reasons why it doesn't matter if you write it, that you're beating a dead horse or that you're going to hurt.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You got to keep your butt in the chair, and because no one in your family is going to be glad to hear you're writing a memoir or an autobiographical novel anyway. Another thing I know a quote back to a question about half hour ago, but this also has to do with our writing and this writing down your memories, writing the truth. I said, you own everything that's happened to you. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better. In other words, you also can write it all down. Any abuse, any neglect, that caffeinated neglect that was so common, all of it.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Weed better, but then I use the bribes and the threats and the MMs and the MSNBC at the end of every pod to get 45 minutes, an hour to get 45 minutes written. That's what it is. That's the equation. So an hour-long pod gets you 45 minutes. Two hours gets you an hour and 15 minutes. This is just realistic. It's not efficient. It's not what your teachers taught you. It's the spiritual creative artistic life. It's loopy and it doubles back and it's like a Mobius strip and it's three steps forward and two back, but you got to sit there because”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Souls, like they're not obviously for entertainment value. They're souls, they're the stuff of the soulscape and the cycles that we pass through. And so beautiful. So that's what I do. That's what the one inch picture frame and the short assignments, how they work. I do a new thing. You'll like this. I decided an hour at a time is too long. I do these things now. I call pods. They're 45 minutes long, and they're based on the one inch picture frame. But so if you write for 45 minutes, you can get 30 minutes of work done. That's just what the loggerism is, that for 15 of those minutes, you're kind of twisting and turning, trying to figure out a way out of having to write at all and how anybody in their right mind would see that you shouldn't have to write for 45 minutes. Well, nobody cares if you or I write again, you know.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe six years ago where he ended up at the bridge, you know, and he wasn't climbing over the side, but he was in the parking lot. It's pretty close for a mom. And when he rode it, hundreds of people said, thank you. You know, I have felt like that. I have been there. I don't live in San Francisco, so I wasn't at the Golden Gate, but I was on, you know, I was wherever they were. If I were your writing partner, I would say, will you tell me that story on paper and write it really badly? You know, it's going to be six pages. And by the time I edit it, I'm going to let you use three of them. But write it long and badly. Just write it. Just do it now. You can do it in an hour, okay? That's what I would do. So that's how I talk to myself when I'm working. That's an incredible. These memories are just so deep in our...”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's an amazing memory, and that's a memory that almost anyone who read it would have experience where the details were completely different, but where they grocked it, you know, they got how you felt. Sam at Hello Humans wrote a piece about a terrible, terrible breakup years ago.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Novel, if you really want to give it a try, because in the beginning what you'll do is you'll look through the one inch picture frame and all you'll do is to start scribbling down these scenes on a legal pad of moments and memories and visions and experiences camp when you were nine years old and that one moment in college where your life changed forever. In fact, let me ask you, Tim, was there a moment in college when your life changed forever?”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wouldn't get out. And in fact, we're blue when you are finally fished out, and your teeth were like those wind-up dentures. And you just write out, that's all I'm going to write. Well, the critical mind that Neil writes about is going to say, what's the point of that? What does that have to do with anything? Where are you going to use that, right? And you have to let the critical guy be the ethical consultant. Let him go back to the library and read a book and wait patiently. And you write this one scene that has to do with this one small piece of lake with a relative and your mom and your dad and your brothers and a bunch of blue cousins, you know, bright blue shivering teeth chattering cousins. And how that was like one of your first experiences of heaven. But the mind is constantly going to tell you there's not really a very effective or efficient reason for you to write this. That's what my writing students are up against constantly. That's why I think I could help you with your.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah early means for me nine There's a lot of us living on this property there's one my grandson goes to school goes to camp he comes over to my house for breakfast there's a lot of animals there's a husband and so I kind of do everything that might distract me I try to be at the desk at nine There's a chapter I don't know if you would remember it from bird by bird on one inch picture frames and I always had my students get each other one inch picture frames and I have one on my desk I could show you if we were in my office and not Sam's so you look through the one inch picture frame and you see one scene you see one thing that happened you see the first time you got in the ice water of Maine the ice water lake in Maine when you were six years old where the parents didn't dare to go in and you and the kids”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I do. I'm so easily distracted. And this is what my dad did, you know, and he wrote in silence. He was at the desk at 5.30 every morning in his little study going tap, tap, tap, you know, on his. Old typewriter in silence, and he loved music. And as soon as he got up, he put on Coltrane or Mozart loudly and got us all up for breakfast. But I write in the silence”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's great to you or to a group of people or whatever. And when I tell it, I get my sense of humor back and I also, I might get people that tear up because I've trusted them with my truth and they nod and they say me too. And then I get to hook into something so much bigger than my own troubled judgmental mind.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“telling me that I was there Tuesday, and I told you, and you and I ended up laughing, and laughter has carbonated holiness, and then we got a bag of M&M, so we drove around town listening to the beatles and eating M&Ms, and we both got so happy. So that realm of telling it out, saying it, telling one person for me is how I let go of whatever's vexing me. You know, people always say very sweetly, let go and let God. And I just want to stab him in the head with a plastic fork like you're a baked potato because obviously if I could like, oh, I would have. You know, and you hear in recovery that everything we let go of has claw marks in it. But the way that I can...”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT