Anne Enright famous quotes

People do not change, they are merely revealed.
-- Anne Enright

#People

Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
-- Anne Enright

#Book #Self #Dying

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
-- Anne Enright

#Writing #World #Opinion

Try to be accurate about stuff.
-- Anne Enright

#Trying #Stuff #Accuracy

There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.
-- Anne Enright

#Dream #Men #Lines

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
-- Anne Enright

#Real #Writing #What Matters

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
-- Anne Enright

#Writing #Thinking #Good Writing

The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
-- Anne Enright

#Book #Writing #Pages

I have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer.
-- Anne Enright

#Wall #Book #Writing

I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.
-- Anne Enright

#Book #Winning #People

I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
-- Anne Enright

#Writing #Giving #Fiction

It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.
-- Anne Enright

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.
-- Anne Enright

#Thinking #Narrators #Sound

The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.
-- Anne Enright

#Writing #Long #Way

I'm really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don't confuse the issues, really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.
-- Anne Enright

#Book #Who I Am #Two

I write anywhere - when I have an idea, it's hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn't be disturbed; it really filled my day.
-- Anne Enright

#Writing #Ideas #Be Kind

To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.
-- Anne Enright

#Writing #Space #Down And

When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.
-- Anne Enright

#Feelings #Needs #Clear

I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain?
-- Anne Enright

#Thinking #Phones #Talking

I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.
-- Anne Enright

#Clever #Writing #Thinking

If you grow up in Ireland and read books then you really are obliged to attempt your own some time. It is not exactly a choice. I still don't know if I am a writer. Believe me, there are days when I have my doubts.
-- Anne Enright

#Growing Up #Believe #Book

You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.
-- Anne Enright

#Jobs #Book #Writing

Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe.
-- Anne Enright

#Children #Nice #Names

If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. Its the people who are always on the brink of crisis who dont hit bottom who are in trouble.
-- Anne Enright

#Fall #People #Together

One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised
-- Anne Enright

#Writing #Reason

I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.
-- Anne Enright

#Writing #Thinking #Worry

There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.
-- Anne Enright

#People #Different #Alive

God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.
-- Anne Enright

#Hate #People #I Hate

There are little thoughts in your head that can grow until they eat your entire mind. Just tiny little thoughts--they are like a cancer, there is no telling what triggers the spread, or who will be struck, and why some get it and others are spared.
-- Anne Enright

#Cancer #Mind #Littles

The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.
-- Anne Enright

#Want

There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch; as loving or as horrible.
-- Anne Enright

#Horrible #Old Woman

There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest.
-- Anne Enright

#Death #Husband #Kids

Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.
-- Anne Enright

#Change #Mars #Powerless

Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
-- Anne Enright

#Blood #Nails #Needs

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.
-- Anne Enright

#Novel #Judged

In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.
-- Anne Enright

#Grandparent #Surnames #Static

If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.
-- Anne Enright

#Character

I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.
-- Anne Enright

#Cutting #Thinking #Eight

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.
-- Anne Enright

#Believe #Evil #Ordinary

And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.
-- Anne Enright

#Writing #Thinking #Boots

Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.
-- Anne Enright

#Cat #Thinking #Lap

We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.
-- Anne Enright

#Art #Body #Gestures

Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.
-- Anne Enright

#Needs

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
-- Anne Enright

#Writing #Thinking #People

I am interested in silences
-- Anne Enright

#Silence

I have no place left to live but in my own heart.
-- Anne Enright

#Heart

We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.
-- Anne Enright

#People #Choices

I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead
-- Anne Enright

#Real #Thinking #Remember

There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.
-- Anne Enright

#Daughter #Running #Falling In Love

A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking
-- Anne Enright

#Talking #Doe #Drink

I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.
-- Anne Enright

#Sex #Grief #Feelings

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
-- Anne Enright

#Roots #Monsters #Stories

I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.
-- Anne Enright

#Lovely #Old Fashioned #Raised

I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.
-- Anne Enright

#Writing #Character #Thinking

I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.
-- Anne Enright

#Looks #Mainstream #Wanted

I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.
-- Anne Enright

#Character #Knowing #Rooms

I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
-- Anne Enright

#Thinking #People #Might

I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.
-- Anne Enright

#Very Happy

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.
-- Anne Enright

#Book #Kids #Years

Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.
-- Anne Enright

#Writing #Problem #Solutions

Here we go again. Always a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game; endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on. Push me pull you. Come here and i'll tell you how much i hate you. Hang on a minute while i leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be.
-- Anne Enright

#Hate #Games #Play

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.
-- Anne Enright

#Book #Writing #People

I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.
-- Anne Enright

#Thinking #People #Construction

And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy -- and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.
-- Anne Enright

#White #People #Lines