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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
Rooms
Knowing
Character
Everything
Mischief
Love
Seriousness
Characters
Reader
Room

More quotes by Anne Enright

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I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.
Anne Enright
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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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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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When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.
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 never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.
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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I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead
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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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 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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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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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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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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I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
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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I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. The Gathering did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.
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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One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised
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