Anne Tyler Quotes

I'm falling into disrepair

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I spend about a year between novels

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

He was wondering if there was some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he'd have trouble saying no.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

When I read, I'm purely a reader

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Ah, God, it's barbaric, however you look at it, ' he told Ruth.'What, cremation?' she asked.'Death.

She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them- an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her.

It wasn't what you said", he told her."It was how I felt when you said it".

You know why I like to talk to you, Delia? You never interrupt with your experiences. Not jiggling your foot till you get a chance to jump in with your life history.

For once, the tears wouldn't come. She saw that Michael might have been right. It really could be too cold to snow.

He honestly believed, for an instant, that what he'd heard was music-a tune piped, a burble of notes, a little scrap of melody floating by on wind and breaking his heart.