Anne Enright Quotations

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

There's no such thing as a life that is not normal, or, there's no such thing as a life that is not abnormal. We all have amazing lives; we all have very dull lives.

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.

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

If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. It's the people who are always on the brink of crisis who don't hit bottom who are in trouble.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

There often is a dark secret in books... There is often a gathering sense of dread; there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in 'Old Ireland.' It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite.

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?

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.

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.

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.

There are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Recently I read the stories I wrote in my early 20s, to put in a volume. And here is this brittle young woman, writing about marriage as, not the worst thing, but the most boring thing that could happen to a person. Now I think I was wrong. I like to be proven wrong.

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.

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.

Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.

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.

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

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

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

One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised

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.

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.

When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can't walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be.

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

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

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

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.

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

I am interested in silences

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Try to be accurate about stuff.

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.

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.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

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.

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

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 have no place left to live but in my own heart.

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.

People do not change, they are merely revealed.