Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
Anne Enright
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Anne Enright
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 11
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Television Director
Television Producer
Writer
Dublin city
Make
Terrible
Blood
Bits
Belief
Find
Needs
Work
Anguish
Something
Nails
More quotes by Anne Enright
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
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
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
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
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
I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
Anne Enright
To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.
Anne Enright
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
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
I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
Anne Enright
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
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
Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe.
Anne Enright
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
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
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
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
And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.
Anne Enright
I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.
Anne Enright
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
