Anne Tyler Quotes - Page 4

For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin

I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I'll have used up all my characters, and then I'll be free to get on with my real life.

I remember leaving the hospital - thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' We're just amateurs.

I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at

I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward.

When I read, I'm purely a reader

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows

I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing

My stories are never quite good enough

I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes - learning how to close the door on it when ordinary lfe intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again - that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.

I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

Try Jesus, you won't regret it, a billboard read.

She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.

We stay in the house so much because I am waiting for the telephone. I seem to be back in my teens, a period I thought I would never have to endure again: my life is spent hoping for things that only someone else can bring about.

Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.

Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.

They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running.

People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.

Liam really enjoyed a good movie. He found it restful to watch people's conversations without being expected to join in. But he always felt sort of lonesome if he didn't have someone next to him to nudge in the ribs at the good parts.

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.

But I don't think people take bad advice. They've got intuition too, you know. In fact I'd be surprised if they take any advice at all.

I spend about a year between novels