Anne Enright Quotes
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My kids are supposed to live till they are one hundred. You don't have to have a perfect house or a perfect relationship with your child or a perfect child, and you yourself do not have to be perfect.
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Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.
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I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
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There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch; as loving or as horrible.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.
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I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.
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I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
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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.
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One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised
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Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.
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I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead
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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.
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In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.
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To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.
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Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.
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People think motherhood involves a lot of domestic labor, and it doesn't. It involves being nice to your children as often as possible. That's part of my trick. I don't have that anxiety about meeting their needs.
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I think it’s very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.
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I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.
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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.
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God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.
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If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.
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Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.
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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.
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Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.
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If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.
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Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
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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.
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