73+ Anne Enright Quotes On Education, Writing And Friendship

Anne Enright is an Irish author and Booker Prize winner. She is best known for her 2007 novel The Gathering, which won the Man Booker Prize. She has also written several other novels, short stories, and non-fiction works, exploring themes of family, identity, and Irish history. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Anne Enright on education, love, writing.

Top 10 Anne Enright Quotes

1. Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
2. 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.
3. Try to be accurate about stuff.
4. 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.
5. In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.
6. People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.
7. When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.
8. Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.
9. 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.
10. I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.

Anne Enright Short Quotes

• People do not change, they are merely revealed.
• Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
• A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.
• If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.
• It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.
• I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.
• I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
• I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.
• For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.
• Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.

Anne Enright Quotes About Love

We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice. — Anne Enright

God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same. — Anne Enright

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

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 side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head. — Anne Enright

There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch; as loving or as horrible. — Anne Enright

Anne Enright Quotes About Writing

If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day. — Anne Enright

One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised — Anne Enright

I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing. — 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'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way. — Anne Enright

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. — 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

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

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

Anne Enright Famous Quotes And Sayings

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 is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die. — 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

There are little thoughts in your head that can grow until they eat your entire mind. Just tiny little thoughts--they are like a cancer, there is no telling what triggers the spread, or who will be struck, and why some get it and others are spared. — Anne Enright

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 tighter. On and on. Push me pull you. Come here and i'll tell you how much i hate you. Hang on a minute while i leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be. — Anne Enright

The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require. — Anne Enright

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. — Anne Enright

My kids are supposed to live till they are one hundred. You don't have to have a perfect house or a perfect relationship with your child or a perfect child, and you yourself do not have to be perfect. — Anne Enright

A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking. — Anne Enright

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 touch. — 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

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. — Anne Enright

There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest. — Anne Enright

If you grow up in Ireland and read books then you really are obliged to attempt your own some time. It is not exactly a choice. I still don't know if I am a writer. Believe me, there are days when I have my doubts. — Anne Enright

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. — Anne Enright

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. — Anne Enright

I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. The Gathering did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time. — Anne Enright

I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead — Anne Enright

There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately. — Anne Enright

Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free. — Anne Enright

I am interested in silences — Anne Enright

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. — Anne Enright

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

Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice. — Anne Enright

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

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

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

Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar. — Anne Enright

Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat. — Anne Enright

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way. — Anne Enright

Having kids is very difficult to do on your own, and it's really crazy difficult to think you're doing it as a team and to find out that you're not actually part of a team. — Anne Enright

No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can't walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be. — Anne Enright

When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down. — Anne Enright

Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear. — Anne Enright

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 my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital. — Anne Enright

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. — Anne Enright

Life Lessons by Anne Enright

1. Anne Enright's work emphasizes the importance of examining one's own life and experiences in order to understand the world around them.
2. Her writing often explores the complexities of family relationships and the power of memory, showing how the past can shape the present.
3. Her work encourages readers to reflect on their own lives and relationships, and to think critically about the world around them.