Anne Enright Quotes

Try to be accurate about stuff.

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 be this, this, and this.

I have no place left to live but in my own heart.

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.

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 find.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.

I’m really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don’t confuse the issues really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.

I write anywhere - when I have an idea it’s hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn’t be disturbed, it really filled my day.

People think motherhood involves a lot of domestic labor, and it doesn't. It involves being nice to your children as often as possible. That's part of my trick. I don't have that anxiety about meeting their needs.

There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.

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 the line.

It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.

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 page.

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 story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

I have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer.

In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.