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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
Literature
Surrogate
Family
Surrogates
Unrelated
Character
Formed
Always
Various
Would
Characters
Choose
Blood
Makeshift

More quotes by Anne Tyler

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View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that and lean into it.
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I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.
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I've always thought sleep was a wonderful invention. Not that being awake isn't nice too, of course. But when I get up in the morning, I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again ... And I never dream, because it distracts my mind from pure sleeping.
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I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.
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The first-person viewpoint is more enjoyable to write, because it lets me meander more freely, and it can reveal more of the character's self-delusions. Really all the advantages are with first-person, so I'm sorry I don't get to pick and choose.
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I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.
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Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!
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I don't type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.
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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.
Anne Tyler
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When I read, I'm purely a reader
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Isn't a memorial service meant to comfort the living?
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Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.
Anne Tyler
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I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it.
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I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.
Anne Tyler
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I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows
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I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing
Anne Tyler
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Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
Anne Tyler
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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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...if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.
Anne Tyler
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It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
Anne Tyler