Anne Enright Thinking Quotations

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?

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

I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.

I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.

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.

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

I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead

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

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 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.

I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.

I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.