Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

There often is a dark secret in books... There is often a gathering sense of dread; there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge.

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

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.

Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.

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 do not change, they are merely revealed.

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

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

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.

I am interested in silences

And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy -- and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.

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

I think I am ready for that. I think I am ready to be met.

Her past is behind her, her future is of little concern. She moves towards the grave, at her own speed.

Because a mother's love is God's greatest joke.

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.

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

And dusk fell because it suited his skin.

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.

Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.

the kind of person took milk in his tea on one day and decided against it on the next.