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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.

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
Going
Irish
Work
Construction
Much
Wearing
Think
Takes
Thinking
Quite
People
Social
Find
Thing

More quotes by Anne Enright

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There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.
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.
Anne Enright
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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.
Anne Enright
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Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
Anne Enright
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Here we go again. Always a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on. Push me pull you. Come here and i'll tell you how much i hate you. Hang on a minute while i leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be.
Anne Enright
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Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
Anne Enright
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In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.
Anne Enright
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If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. Its the people who are always on the brink of crisis who dont hit bottom who are in trouble.
Anne Enright
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I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.
Anne Enright
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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.
Anne Enright
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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.
Anne Enright
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I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.
Anne Enright
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I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.
Anne Enright
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The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.
Anne Enright
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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.
Anne Enright
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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.
Anne Enright
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I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
Anne Enright
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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.
Anne Enright
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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.
Anne Enright
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No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can't walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be.
Anne Enright