Quotes from Anne Enright

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

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.

I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad

He had beautiful manners. Which, if you ask me, was mostly a question of saying nothing, to anyone, ever.

Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault.

There are long stretches of time when I don't know what I am doing, or what I have done - nothing mostly, but sometimes it would be nice to know what kind of nothing that was...

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... and it is just as you suspected - most of the stuff that you do is just stupid, really stupid, most of the stuff you do is just nagging and whining and picking up for people who are too lazy to love you.

I have been falling for months. I have been falling into my own life, for months. And I am about to hit it now.

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.

I see her on a Sunday after lunch, and we spend a pleasant afternoon, and when I leave I find she has run through me like water.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.

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

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

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.

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

Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in 'Old Ireland.' It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite.