Ask a room of writers for one line from Annie Dillard and you'll usually hear the same one. Don't save your best material. Spend it, use it up, put everything on the page while you still have it in your hands.

The Direct Answer
Spend everything you have on the page now, and never hoard your best ideas for a later book.
It's the core lesson of The Writing Life.

Spend It All

The advice against hoarding is the Dillard passage most writers end up carrying around. The instinct she's warning about is familiar. You write something good, a sharp image or a scene that lands, and a voice tells you to save it for the important book you'll write later. Dillard says spend it now. Holding it back, in her account, is how it dies on you.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Why Hoarding Backfires

Her reasoning is practical as much as it is romantic. Material kept in reserve tends to go stale, and the next good idea usually shows up only after you've given the last one away. The well refills once you empty it. She is blunt about the cost of doing the opposite. Whatever you refuse to spend gets lost to you anyway, like opening a safe you thought was full and finding it burned to ash.

The advice scales past single sentences. It shapes how she thinks about a whole career, where each book gets everything the writer has at the time, and the next book is left to fend for itself with whatever comes next. It even extends to teaching. What you learn, she believed, is meant to be given away, since anything you keep to yourself ends up lost to you in the end.

This sits alongside the rest of her working philosophy. For the routines and the bare rooms behind the advice, read the full Annie Dillard writing routine.

What You Can Steal