Anne Tyler Quotes
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People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.
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Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.
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When I read, I'm purely a reader
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The first-person viewpoint is more enjoyable to write, because it lets me meander more freely, and it can reveal more of the character's self-delusions. Really all the advantages are with first-person, so I'm sorry I don't get to pick and choose.
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View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that and lean into it.
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For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.
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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?
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Just because we're related doesn't mean we are any good at understanding each other.
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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.
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Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.
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It’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are .. muffled, sort of. Then, ever now and then, I lift the corner of the blanket just to check, and .. whoa! Like a knife! I’m not sure that will ever change.
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It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.
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None of my own experiences ever finds its way into my work. However, the stages of my life - motherhood, middle age, etc. - often influence my subject matter.
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I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows
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(About parenting:) ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.
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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?
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Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.
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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.
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I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get
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Sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened.
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She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.
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I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
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Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there's nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.
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It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.
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My decision to start a new one is just that, a decision, since I never get inspirations.
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I don't type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.
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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.
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Isn't a memorial service meant to comfort the living?
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...it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.
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Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.
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