Anne Tyler famous quotes

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.
-- Anne Tyler

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!
-- Anne Tyler

#Funny #Dog #Mean

It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.
-- Anne Tyler

#Life #Relationship #Offering

People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.
-- Anne Tyler

#Good Luck #People #Luck

I've always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals. I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?
-- Anne Tyler

#Dog #Travel #Mean

I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them.
-- Anne Tyler

#Fun #Thinking #What Matters

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
-- Anne Tyler

#Once Upon A Time #Persons

There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house.
-- Anne Tyler

#Rain #House #Peaceful

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.
-- Anne Tyler

#Book #Writing #Thinking

It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.
-- Anne Tyler

#Who You Are

I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.
-- Anne Tyler

#Children #Book #Writing

While armchair travelers dream of going places, traveling armchairs dream of staying put.
-- Anne Tyler

#Dream #Travel #Armchairs

It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
-- Anne Tyler

#Family #Children #Writing

I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get
-- Anne Tyler

#Chance #One Chance

I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing?
-- Anne Tyler

#Mother #Children #Writing

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.
-- Anne Tyler

#Writing #Meals #Literature

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning
-- Anne Tyler

#Morning #Writing #Trying

If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.
-- Anne Tyler

#Writing #Literature

Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.
-- Anne Tyler

#Smell #Persons

But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.
-- Anne Tyler

#Doing Nothing #Ends

I write because I want to have more than one life.
-- Anne Tyler

#Writing #Want

...if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.
-- Anne Tyler

#Attitude #Bad Attitude #Looks

I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I'll have used up all my characters, and then I'll be free to get on with my real life.
-- Anne Tyler

#Real #Character #Literature

For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.
-- Anne Tyler

#Character #Blood #Literature

Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.
-- Anne Tyler

#Death #Body #Odd

Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.
-- Anne Tyler

#Death #People #World

She worded it a bit strongly, but I do find myself more and more struck by the differences between the sexes. To put it another way: All marriages are mixed marriages.
-- Anne Tyler

#Sex #Differences #Way

I don't know what takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world.
-- Anne Tyler

#Survival #Promise #Endurance

The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest.
-- Anne Tyler

#Character #Reflection #Opportunity

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns
-- Anne Tyler

#Believe #Giving #Stories

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.
-- Anne Tyler

#Cousin #Mistake #New Beginnings

My decision to start a new one is just that, a decision, since I never get inspirations.
-- Anne Tyler

#Inspiration #Decision

I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward.
-- Anne Tyler

#Writing #Shy #Appearance

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple.
-- Anne Tyler

#Writing #Simple #Greed

I remember leaving the hospital - thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' We're just amateurs.
-- Anne Tyler

#Baby #Thinking #Waiting

View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that and lean into it.
-- Anne Tyler

#Views #Burden #Accepting

I wonder how many times we dream that kind of dream-something strange and illogical-and fail to realize God is trying to tell us something.
-- Anne Tyler

#Dream #Trying #Strange

Farmers are patient men. They got to be. Got to see those seeds come up week by week, fraction by fraction, and sweat it out for some days not knowing yet is it weeds or vegetables ...
-- Anne Tyler

#Weed #Men #Vegetables

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.
-- Anne Tyler

#Writing #Numbers #Pages

Some people are aware of everything that is going on everywhere at every moment in their lives.
-- Anne Tyler

#People #Moments #Awareness

I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.
-- Anne Tyler

#Real #Book #Thinking

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.
-- Anne Tyler

#Book #Childhood #Waiting

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.
-- Anne Tyler

#Thinking #Shoes #Luck

We stay in the house so much because I am waiting for the telephone. I seem to be back in my teens, a period I thought I would never have to endure again: my life is spent hoping for things that only someone else can bring about.
-- Anne Tyler

#Waiting #House #Teens

Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.
-- Anne Tyler

#Moving #Years #Names

Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.
-- Anne Tyler

#Jobs #Knowledge #Information

I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it ...
-- Anne Tyler

#Marriage #Lasts #Parenthood

Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.
-- Anne Tyler

#Lying #Writing #Trying

Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I'm going to have to think about how it will affect other people.
-- Anne Tyler

#Thinking #People #Finals

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
-- Anne Tyler

#Writing #Dinner #Homesick

Isn't a memorial service meant to comfort the living?
-- Anne Tyler

#Memorial #Comfort #Memorial Service

Try Jesus, you won't regret it, a billboard read.
-- Anne Tyler

#Jesus #Regret #Trying

How plotless real life was!
-- Anne Tyler

#Life #Real #Real Life

Sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened.
-- Anne Tyler

#Pain #Sooner Or Later

(About parenting:) ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.
-- Anne Tyler

#Drama #Parenting #Broken

... everyone must play his role.
-- Anne Tyler

#Play #Roles

I've always thought sleep was a wonderful invention. Not that being awake isn't nice too, of course. But when I get up in the morning, I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again ... And I never dream, because it distracts my mind from pure sleeping ...
-- Anne Tyler

#Dream #Morning #Nice

Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged.
-- Anne Tyler

#Women #Reins

I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.
-- Anne Tyler

#Writing #Thinking #Superstitions

When I'm working on something, I proceed as if no one else will ever read it.
-- Anne Tyler

I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes - learning how to close the door on it when ordinary lfe intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again - that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.
-- Anne Tyler

#Writing #Doors #Two

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows
-- Anne Tyler

#Believe #I Believe #Novel