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Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there's nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.

Anne Tyler

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Anne Tyler
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 25
Librarian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Hard
Writing
Mind
Snag
Mechanics
Mechanic
Caught
Nothing
Right

More quotes by Anne Tyler

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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 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.
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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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...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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Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.
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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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I didn't really choose to write I more or less fell into it.
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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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...it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.
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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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There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house.
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And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren't for love.
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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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One sad thing about this world is that the acts that take the most out of you are usually the ones that people will never know about. (from 'Celestial Navigation')
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I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.
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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 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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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.
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... everyone must play his role.
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Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
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