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

More quotes by 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
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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
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I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain?
Anne Enright
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We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.
Anne Enright
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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
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I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
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 quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
Anne Enright
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There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch as loving or as horrible.
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 was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.
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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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
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I write anywhere - when I have an idea it’s hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn’t be disturbed, it really filled my day.
Anne Enright
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Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.
Anne Enright
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It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.
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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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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I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.
Anne Enright
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Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
Anne Enright