Quotes from Anne Tyler

I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.

It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.

People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,' he said. 'The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it's like missing water. Every day, you notice the person's absence more.

But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I'm joining the circus. Although I'm happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.

She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.

But it's like time is sort of Ã¢â'¬Â¦ balanced. We're young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we're old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don't you see.

Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I'm going to have to think about how it will affect other people.

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away

I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.

There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.

How plotless real life was!

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple.

He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.

I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I'll have used up all my characters, and then I'll be free to get on with my real life.

I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

I write because I want to have more than one life.

I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing.

it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.

There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.

You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is?

They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running.

It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it's all going to end.

You're only ever as happy as your least happy child?'