Anne Enright Quotes
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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.
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I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
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I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.
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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.
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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.
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It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.
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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.
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If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. It's the people who are always on the brink of crisis who don't hit bottom who are in trouble.
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For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
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I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.
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To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.
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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?
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I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
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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.
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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.
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I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.