Anne Tyler Quotes

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

  Anne Tyler

• 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?

  Anne Tyler

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

  Anne Tyler

• 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.

  Anne Tyler

• 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.

  Anne Tyler

• 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.

  Anne Tyler

• 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?

  Anne Tyler

• 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.

  Anne Tyler

• I spend about a year between novels.

  Anne Tyler

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

  Anne Tyler

• 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.

  Anne Tyler

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

  Anne Tyler

• 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.

  Anne Tyler

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

  Anne Tyler

• 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.

  Anne Tyler

• 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.

  Anne Tyler

• 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.

  Anne Tyler

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

  Anne Tyler

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

  Anne Tyler

• 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.

  Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler (47)

Birth:	25th October, 1941
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

About

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published 19 novels, the best known of which are Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, and Breathing Lessons. The former two were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the third won it. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence.

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Today's Anniversary - 1st January

Births

• 1943 - Don Novello
• 1864 - Alfred Stieglitz
• 1768 - Maria Edgeworth
• 1863 - Baron Pierre de Coubertin
• 1949 - Olivia Goldsmith

Deaths

• 2001 - Ray Walston
• 2007 - Tillie Olsen
• 2002 - Julia Phillips
• 1982 - Victor Buono
• 1995 - Eugene Wigner