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

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
Policy
Space
Write
Able
Writing
Always
Central

More quotes by 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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If you grow up in Ireland and read books then you really are obliged to attempt your own some time. It is not exactly a choice. I still don't know if I am a writer. Believe me, there are days when I have my doubts.
Anne Enright
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It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.
Anne Enright
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Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.
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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There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch as loving or as horrible.
Anne Enright
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One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised
Anne Enright
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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
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I have no place left to live but in my own heart.
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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My kids are supposed to live till they are one hundred. You don't have to have a perfect house or a perfect relationship with your child or a perfect child, and you yourself do not have to be perfect.
Anne Enright
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People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.
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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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.
Anne Enright
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I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.
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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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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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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I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.
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