Anne Enright quotes

Anne Enright is an acclaimed Irish author and novelist, celebrated for her insightful explorations of family and identity. Her novel "The Gathering" won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. She continues to be a significant voice in contemporary Irish literature. Here are 70 of her quotes:

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

Anne Enright

I am interested in silences.

Anne Enright

If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. Its the people who are always on the brink of crisis who dont hit bottom who are in trouble.

Anne Enright

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

Anne Enright

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

Anne Enright

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

Anne Enright

I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.

Anne Enright

People do not change, they are merely revealed.

Anne Enright

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

Anne Enright

I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.

Anne Enright

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

Anne Enright

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

Anne Enright

Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe.

Anne Enright

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.

Anne Enright

I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.

Anne Enright

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.

Anne Enright

I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.

Anne Enright

The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.

Anne Enright

There's no such thing as a life that is not normal, or, there's no such thing as a life that is not abnormal. We all have amazing lives; we all have very dull lives.

Anne Enright

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.

Anne Enright

You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.

Anne Enright

I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain?

Anne Enright