Quote

To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.

Anne Enright

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Enright
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 11
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Television Director
Television Producer
Writer
Dublin city
Space
Write
Able
Writing
Always
Central
Policy

More quotes by Anne Enright

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.
Anne Enright
Image
A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking.
Anne Enright
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
Anne Enright
Image
I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.
Anne Enright
Image
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
Image
I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain?
Anne Enright
Image
It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.
Anne Enright
Image
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
Image
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
Image
For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.
Anne Enright
Image
I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.
Anne Enright
Image
I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.
Anne Enright
Image
There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.
Anne Enright