Anne Enright quotes

We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice. (Anne Enright)
I have no place left to live but in my own heart. View quote
Anne Enright
I am interested in silences. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time. View quote
Anne Enright
I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from. View quote
Anne Enright
I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely. View quote
Anne Enright
I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be. View quote
Anne Enright
People do not change, they are merely revealed. View quote
Anne Enright
It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life. View quote
Anne Enright
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. (Anne Enright)
I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true. View quote
Anne Enright
I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural. View quote
Anne Enright
In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense. (Anne Enright)
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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? View quote
Anne Enright