Anne Tyler Quotes

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.

View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that and lean into it.

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!

When you have children, you're obligated to live.

There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.

It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.

It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple.

People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.

How plotless real life was!

Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away

Just because we're related doesn't mean we are any good at understanding each other.

For me, writing something down was the only road out...I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.

It’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are .. muffled, sort of. Then, ever now and then, I lift the corner of the blanket just to check, and .. whoa! Like a knife! I’m not sure that will ever change.

If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.

I've always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals. I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?

I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get

People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.

In real life I avoid all parties altogether, but on paper I can mingle with the best of them

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.