Anne Enright Quotes

Ireland, Author
October 11, 1962

Anne Teresa Enright FRSL (born 11 October 1962) is an Irish author. She has published novels, short stories, essays, and one non-fiction book. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. She has also won the 1991 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the 2001 Encore Award and the 2008 Irish Novel of the Year.

Also known as Essayist

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

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

Anne Enright
- People
- Work
- Writing

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

Anne Enright
- Grandparents
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.

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.

Anne Enright
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.

Anne Enright
- Feeling
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.

Anne Enright
Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe.

Anne Enright
- People
- Nice

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

Anne Enright