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I remember leaving the hospital - thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' We're just amateurs.

Anne Tyler

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Anne Tyler
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 25
Librarian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Literature
Babies
Remember
Hospitals
Going
Leaving
Thinking
Wait
Amateurs
Baby
Beans
Walk
Hospitality
Walks
Hospital
Waiting
License

More quotes by Anne Tyler

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I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing
Anne Tyler
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People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.
Anne Tyler
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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.
Anne Tyler
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When you have children, you're obligated to live.
Anne Tyler
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Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.
Anne Tyler
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It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
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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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.
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...if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.
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... everyone must play his role.
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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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I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.
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My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.
Anne Tyler
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Farmers are patient men. They got to be. Got to see those seeds come up week by week, fraction by fraction, and sweat it out for some days not knowing yet is it weeds or vegetables.
Anne Tyler
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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
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But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.
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 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
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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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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