Anne Enright Quotes

People do not change, they are merely revealed.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.

I am interested in silences

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

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