Anne Enright Quotes about Writing

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.

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.

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.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

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

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 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.

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

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 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 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 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.