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For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

Anne Tyler

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Anne Tyler
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 25
Librarian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Would
Various
Characters
Choose
Blood
Makeshift
Literature
Surrogate
Family
Surrogates
Character
Unrelated
Always
Formed

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The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.
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But I don't think people take bad advice. They've got intuition too, you know. In fact I'd be surprised if they take any advice at all.
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Point of view is not something I consciously decide. Almost always, when I come up with a plot I find that the point of view has automatically arrived with it, part and parcel of the story.
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... everyone must play his role.
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Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.
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I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.
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The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning
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I've always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals. I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?
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In real life I avoid all parties altogether, but on paper I can mingle with the best of them
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I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes - learning how to close the door on it when ordinary lfe intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again - that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.
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Just because we're related doesn't mean we are any good at understanding each other.
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I'm falling into disrepair
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I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.
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I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.
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I write because I want to have more than one life.
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My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.
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He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.
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Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details any good lie does.
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He was wondering if there was some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he'd have trouble saying no.
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We stay in the house so much because I am waiting for the telephone. I seem to be back in my teens, a period I thought I would never have to endure again: my life is spent hoping for things that only someone else can bring about.
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