Quote

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

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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
People
Keep
Second
Able
Name
Wells
Days
Naming
Firsts
Names
Suspect
Well
Nice
Suspects
First
Child
Gave
Children
Secret
Safe
Like
Speak
Took

More quotes by Anne Enright

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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.
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Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.
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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.
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I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.
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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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One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised
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A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.
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In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.
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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.
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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.
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I have no place left to live but in my own heart.
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I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.
Anne Enright
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I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.
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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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
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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.
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Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.
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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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.
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Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.
Anne Enright