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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: 61
Born: 1962
Born: October 11
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Television Director
Television Producer
Writer
Dublin city
Something
Nails
Make
Terrible
Blood
Bits
Belief
Find
Needs
Work
Anguish
More quotes by 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
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
A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.
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
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
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
I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
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
To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.
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
I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
Anne Enright
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
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
When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.
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
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
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
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
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
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
