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She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.

Anne Tyler

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Anne Tyler
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 25
Librarian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Talking
Interesting
Young
Good
People
Foreigners
Seemed
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More quotes by Anne Tyler

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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.
Anne Tyler
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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.
Anne Tyler
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(About parenting:) ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.
Anne Tyler
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I don't want to say I hear voices well, actually I do hear voices, but I don't think it's supernatural. I think it's just that when characters are given enough texture and backbone, then lo and behold, they stand on their own.
Anne Tyler
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The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.
Anne Tyler
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If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.
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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I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.
Anne Tyler
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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.
Anne Tyler
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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.
Anne Tyler
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When I read, I'm purely a reader
Anne Tyler
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There's surprisingly little difference between writing from a male angle and from a female angle, but I feel more restricted in my language when I'm writing as a male character because males tend to sound less emotionally expressive than females.
Anne Tyler
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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.
Anne Tyler
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It’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are .. muffled, sort of. Then, ever now and then, I lift the corner of the blanket just to check, and .. whoa! Like a knife! I’m not sure that will ever change.
Anne Tyler
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It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.
Anne Tyler
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...if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.
Anne Tyler
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For me, writing something down was the only road out...I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.
Anne Tyler
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I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns
Anne Tyler
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But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.
Anne Tyler
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My stories are never quite good enough
Anne Tyler