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I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.

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
Knowing
Character
Everything
Mischief
Love
Seriousness
Characters
Reader
Room
Rooms

More quotes by Anne Enright

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Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.
Anne Enright
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Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.
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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Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
Anne Enright
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I write anywhere - when I have an idea it’s hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn’t be disturbed, it really filled my day.
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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I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.
Anne Enright
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People think motherhood involves a lot of domestic labor, and it doesn't. It involves being nice to your children as often as possible. That's part of my trick. I don't have that anxiety about meeting their needs.
Anne Enright
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I am interested in silences
Anne Enright
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If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.
Anne Enright
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People do not change, they are merely revealed.
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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Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
Anne Enright
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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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There are little thoughts in your head that can grow until they eat your entire mind. Just tiny little thoughts--they are like a cancer, there is no telling what triggers the spread, or who will be struck, and why some get it and others are spared.
Anne Enright
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Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice.
Anne Enright
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If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.
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
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God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.
Anne Enright
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I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
Anne Enright