Life & Wisdom Quote by Anne Lamott

A small act of defiance disguised as a shrug. Anne Lamott’s line lands because it refuses the neat shelving system that publishing, bookstores, and even readers use to make art legible. “I don’t really have a genre these days” isn’t just a résumé update; it’s a quiet veto of the idea that a writer’s identity should be a single, market-friendly noun.

The first move is strategic specificity: “six novels and four pieces of nonfiction” is arithmetic as authority. She’s not pleading to be taken seriously outside a lane; she’s announcing she’s already done the laps in multiple lanes and the scoreboard can catch up. Then comes the disarming phrase “these days,” which softens what could sound like a manifesto. Lamott performs casualness so the statement feels like lived truth rather than branding. That’s her signature: sincerity with a sideways grin.

Subtextually, she’s pushing back against the cultural obsession with categorization as a substitute for attention. Genre becomes a proxy for how we decide whether something is “for us,” and Lamott is asking to be read without that pre-filter. There’s also a deeper, almost spiritual undertow: if you’re a writer known for talking about messy humanity, then refusing a fixed genre is a refusal of a fixed self. People change; so does the work.

Context matters: Lamott comes out of a literary world that increasingly rewards specialization and algorithmic clarity. Her statement reclaims the older, riskier idea that a writer’s job is to follow the material, not the shelf.