Anne Enright Quotes

55 quotes in 816 categories

• The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the…
• Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
• Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your…
• There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw…
• Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.
• We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal…
• Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.
• And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and…
• Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self…
• I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.
• I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to…
• A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking
• I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig…
• I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to…
• The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.
• Here we go again. Always a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game; endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and…
• Try to be accurate about stuff.
• Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.
• For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.
• I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.

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