Quote

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

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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
Reader
Revelation
Story
Pulling
Less
Mechanism
Someone
Revelations
Stories
Plot
Intimate
Performative
Ears
Externalized
Telling
Antics

More quotes by Anne Enright

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Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
Anne Enright
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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
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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
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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 was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.
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 have no place left to live but in my own heart.
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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I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.
Anne Enright
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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 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
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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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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
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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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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
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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
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Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.
Anne Enright
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Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.
Anne Enright
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Try to be accurate about stuff.
Anne Enright
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If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.
Anne Enright