Quote

We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.

Anne Enright

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Anne Enright
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 11
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Television Director
Television Producer
Writer
Dublin city
Public
Welcomes
Small
Wiping
Lost
Washing
Art
Gestures
Body
Tenderness
Formal
Forgotten
Touch

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One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised
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Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
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A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.
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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.
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Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.
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I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
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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.
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When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.
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I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
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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.
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Try to be accurate about stuff.
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God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.
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Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
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There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest.
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There's quite a big gap when it comes to that dual identity of mother and child, or even a pregnant woman, or a nursing woman. It kind of begs the question of that very strong Western idea of the individual self.
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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.
Anne Enright
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I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.
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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.
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A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking.
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I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.
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