Anne Tyler Quotes - Page 2

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.

I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them.

Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.

But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.

...he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.

I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it.

I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing?

I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning

I don't know what takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world.

... everyone must play his role.

Sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened.

No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one's ring from a nurse or an undertaker.

I don't type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.

She worded it a bit strongly, but I do find myself more and more struck by the differences between the sexes. To put it another way: All marriages are mixed marriages.

Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.

He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.

...if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.

Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.

Some people are aware of everything that is going on everywhere at every moment in their lives.

I'm falling into disrepair

I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.

There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house.