Anne Enright Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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.

One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised

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

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.

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.

Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

Try to be accurate about stuff.

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

People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.

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.

Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice.

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

I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.

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.

Having kids is very difficult to do on your own, and it's really crazy difficult to think you're doing it as a team and to find out that you're not actually part of a team.

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

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

Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.

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.

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

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

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.

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