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My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

Anne Tyler

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Anne Tyler
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 25
Librarian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Family
Tell
Wells
Well
Writing
Crummy
Always
Meals
Novel
Literature

More quotes by Anne Tyler

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...he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.
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...it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.
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Sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened.
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I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.
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The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
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Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.
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I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.
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People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.
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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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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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Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.
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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 think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at
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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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I remember leaving the hospital - thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' We're just amateurs.
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It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away
Anne Tyler
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I'm falling into disrepair
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(About parenting:) ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.
Anne Tyler
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I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin
Anne Tyler
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I spend about a year between novels
Anne Tyler