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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.

Anne Tyler

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Anne Tyler
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 25
Librarian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Remember
Going
Think
Draft
Thinking
Affect
People
Final
Finals
Literature
Force

More quotes by Anne Tyler

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I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.
Anne Tyler
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I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it.
Anne Tyler
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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
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When you have children, you're obligated to live.
Anne Tyler
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...it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.
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I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows
Anne Tyler
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It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.
Anne Tyler
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You think we're a family,' Cody said, turning back. 'You think we're some jolly, situation-comedy family when we're in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place, and our mother was a witch.
Anne Tyler
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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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My stories are never quite good enough
Anne Tyler
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The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.
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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For me, writing something down was the only road out...I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.
Anne Tyler
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How plotless real life was!
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. When my characters join the circus, I’m joining the circus. Although I’m happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.
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 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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Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.
Anne Tyler
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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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I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.
Anne Tyler