Quote

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

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
Writing
Heartfelt
Much
Ireland
Think
Hopeful
Thinking
Clever
Like
American
People
Wish
Moore
Write
Messed
Women
Jennifer

More quotes by Anne Enright

Image
Try to be accurate about stuff.
Anne Enright
Image
Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
Anne Enright
Image
I think it’s very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.
Anne Enright
Image
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
Image
Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
Anne Enright
Image
We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.
Anne Enright
Image
Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.
Anne Enright
Image
Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
Anne Enright
Image
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
Image
I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.
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
Image
I’m really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don’t confuse the issues really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.
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
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
I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
Anne Enright
Image
It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.
Anne Enright
Image
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
Image
There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest.
Anne Enright
Image
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
Image
I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
Anne Enright