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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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Anne Tyler
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 25
Librarian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Term
Strips
Away
Novels
Psychological
Seems
Celebrate
Good
Terms
Life
Ordinary
Mystery
Novel
Summing

More quotes by Anne Tyler

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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
Anne Tyler
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I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
Anne Tyler
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I didn't really choose to write I more or less fell into it.
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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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 is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.
Anne Tyler
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Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.
Anne Tyler
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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')
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.
Anne Tyler
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They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong they pass each other and keep running.
Anne Tyler
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I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.
Anne Tyler
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It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.
Anne Tyler
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How plotless real life was!
Anne Tyler
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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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View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that and lean into it.
Anne Tyler
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Isn't a memorial service meant to comfort the living?
Anne Tyler
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My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.
Anne Tyler
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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.
Anne Tyler
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He was wondering if there was some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he'd have trouble saying no.
Anne Tyler
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I write because I want more than one life I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple.
Anne Tyler