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I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing?

Anne Tyler

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Anne Tyler
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 25
Librarian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Still
Came
Children
Child
Writing
Waiting
Work
Literature
Found
Mother
Another
Standing
Stills
Asked

More quotes by Anne Tyler

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My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.
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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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People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.
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I spend about a year between novels
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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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Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
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But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.
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People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,' he said. 'The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it's like missing water. Every day, you notice the person's absence more.
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I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get
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There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.
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Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I'm going to have to think about how it will affect other people.
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Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.
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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.
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I'm falling into disrepair
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I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.
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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
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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 seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away
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The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest.
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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