Quotes from 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.

Recently I read the stories I wrote in my early 20s, to put in a volume. And here is this brittle young woman, writing about marriage as, not the worst thing, but the most boring thing that could happen to a person. Now I think I was wrong. I like to be proven wrong.

There are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.

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

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.

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.

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.

I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.