Anne Tyler Quotations

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!

I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing?

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

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

People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.

When I'm working on something, I proceed as if no one else will ever read it.

I've always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals. I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?

For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

In real life I avoid all parties altogether, but on paper I can mingle with the best of them

I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.

I don't want to say I hear voices; well, actually I do hear voices, but I don't think it's supernatural. I think it's just that when characters are given enough texture and backbone, then lo and behold, they stand on their own.

None of my own experiences ever finds its way into my work. However, the stages of my life - motherhood, middle age, etc. - often influence my subject matter.

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.

I remember leaving the hospital - thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' We're just amateurs.

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.

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.

I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again.

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

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.

It's true that it's a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.

She worded it a bit strongly, but I do find myself more and more struck by the differences between the sexes. To put it another way: All marriages are mixed marriages.

While armchair travelers dream of going places, traveling armchairs dream of staying put.

For me, writing something down was the only road out.

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.

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.

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning

And I am interested in the fact that class is very much a factor in America, even though it's not supposed to be.

At most I'll spend three or four hours daily, sometimes less.

I didn't really choose to write; I more or less fell into it.

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

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows

I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward.

If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.

My decision to start a new one is just that, a decision, since I never get inspirations.

I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns

I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at

I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin

The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest.

For me, writing something down was the only road out...I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.

She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her view of them

The first-person viewpoint is more enjoyable to write, because it lets me meander more freely, and it can reveal more of the character's self-delusions. Really all the advantages are with first-person, so I'm sorry I don't get to pick and choose.

There's surprisingly little difference between writing from a male angle and from a female angle, but I feel more restricted in my language when I'm writing as a male character because males tend to sound less emotionally expressive than females.

Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged.

Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.

I spend about a year between novels

The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.

No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one's ring from a nurse or an undertaker.

When I read, I'm purely a reader

My stories are never quite good enough

View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that and lean into it.

People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.

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.

One sad thing about this world is that the acts that take the most out of you are usually the ones that people will never know about. (from 'Celestial Navigation')

She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.

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.

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

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

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

You think we're a family,' Cody said, turning back. 'You think we're some jolly, situation-comedy family when we're in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place, and our mother was a witch.

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

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 struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.

It’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are .. muffled, sort of. Then, ever now and then, I lift the corner of the blanket just to check, and .. whoa! Like a knife! I’m not sure that will ever change.

And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren't for love.

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.

Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.

Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there's nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.

How plotless real life was!

Sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened.

I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it ...

Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.

We stay in the house so much because I am waiting for the telephone. I seem to be back in my teens, a period I thought I would never have to endure again: my life is spent hoping for things that only someone else can bring about.

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.

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.

Some people are aware of everything that is going on everywhere at every moment in their lives.

(About parenting:) ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.

... everyone must play his role.

I've always thought sleep was a wonderful invention. Not that being awake isn't nice too, of course. But when I get up in the morning, I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again ... And I never dream, because it distracts my mind from pure sleeping ...

Try Jesus, you won't regret it, a billboard read.

Isn't a memorial service meant to comfort the living?

But I don't think people take bad advice. They've got intuition too, you know. In fact I'd be surprised if they take any advice at all.

...if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.

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

People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.

But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.

Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.

I don't know what takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world.

Just because we're related doesn't mean we are any good at understanding each other.

I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes - learning how to close the door on it when ordinary lfe intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again - that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.

Farmers are patient men. They got to be. Got to see those seeds come up week by week, fraction by fraction, and sweat it out for some days not knowing yet is it weeds or vegetables ...

I wonder how many times we dream that kind of dream-something strange and illogical-and fail to realize God is trying to tell us something.

Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.

Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.

Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.