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Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.

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
Bits
Belief
Find
Needs
Work
Anguish
Something
Nails
Make
Terrible
Blood

More quotes by 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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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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Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.
Anne Enright
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There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.
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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The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.
Anne Enright
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I am interested in silences
Anne Enright
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A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking.
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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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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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
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A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.
Anne Enright
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Having kids is very difficult to do on your own, and it's really crazy difficult to think you're doing it as a team and to find out that you're not actually part of a team.
Anne Enright
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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
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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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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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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
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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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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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God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.
Anne Enright