Quote

When you have children, you're obligated to live.

Anne Tyler

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Tyler
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 25
Librarian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Obligated
Live
Children

More quotes by Anne Tyler

Image
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?
Anne Tyler
Image
...it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.
Anne Tyler
Image
The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.
Anne Tyler
Image
Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.
Anne Tyler
Image
I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again.
Anne Tyler
Image
How plotless real life was!
Anne Tyler
Image
I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say I'll have used up all my characters, and then I'll be free to get on with my real life.
Anne Tyler
Image
He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.
Anne Tyler
Image
Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.
Anne Tyler
Image
She worded it a bit strongly, but I do find myself more and more struck by the differences between the sexes. To put it another way: All marriages are mixed marriages.
Anne Tyler
Image
She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.
Anne Tyler
Image
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.
Anne Tyler
Image
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
Image
I write because I want more than one life I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple.
Anne Tyler
Image
And I am interested in the fact that class is very much a factor in America, even though it's not supposed to be.
Anne Tyler
Image
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
Anne Tyler
Image
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
Anne Tyler
Image
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.
Anne Tyler
Image
It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.
Anne Tyler
Image
I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward.
Anne Tyler