People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

This remark comes from Annie Dillard’s reflections on the practical problem of finding material worth writing about. In the context of her advice on writing and artistic attention, she distinguishes between common, broadly shared tastes (“pretty much the same things”) and the more idiosyncratic fixations that can give a writer distinctive subject matter. The line appears in her craft-oriented prose, where she urges writers to look past what is merely popular or generally lovable and instead to notice what they, personally, cannot help but care about—often the odd, narrow, or stubborn interests that persist regardless of fashion or audience.

Dillard contrasts common taste with the writer’s need for singularity. Most people, she suggests, converge on broadly shared pleasures—beauty, comfort, familiar stories—so choosing subjects merely by what one “loves best” risks producing work that is generic or secondhand. The writer’s real task is to locate the obsessions, curiosities, and perceptions that are uniquely theirs—what they “alone love at all”—and to build art from that private angle of vision. The line argues for authenticity and specificity: originality comes less from inventing exotic topics than from attending fiercely to one’s own particular fascinations and experiences, even if they seem odd, narrow, or unfashionable.