Top 100 Anne Enright Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.”

— Anne Enright

2. “It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.”

— Anne Enright

3. “Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.”

— Anne Enright

4. “I am interested in silences.”

— Anne Enright

5. “Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.”

— Anne Enright

6. “Only bad writers think that their work is really good.”

— Anne Enright

7. “The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.”

— Anne Enright

8. “The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.”

— Anne Enright

9. “People do not change, they are merely revealed.”

— Anne Enright

10. “The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.”

— Anne Enright

11. “When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.”

— Anne Enright

12. “If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.”

— Anne Enright

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

— Anne Enright

14. “People think motherhood involves a lot of domestic labor, and it doesn’t. It involves being nice to your children as often as possible. That’s part of my trick. I don’t have that anxiety about meeting their needs.”

— Anne Enright

15. “There is nothing as tentative as an old woman’s touch; as loving or as horrible.”

— Anne Enright

16. “I have been falling for months. I have been falling into my own life, for months. And I am about to hit it now.”

— Anne Enright

17. “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.”

— Anne Enright

18. “To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.”

— Anne Enright

19. “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.”

— Anne Enright

20. “A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.”

— Anne Enright

21. “I’m really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don’t confuse the issues, really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.”

— Anne Enright

22. “There are little thoughts in your head that can grow until they eat your entire mind. Just tiny little thoughts – they are like a cancer, there is no telling what triggers the spread, or who will be struck, and why some get it and others are spared.”

— Anne Enright

23. “We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.”

— Anne Enright

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

— Anne Enright

25. “I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.”

— Anne Enright

26. “I’m very keenly aware that there aren’t very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.”

— Anne Enright

27. “Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is, or how “made up”: what matters is its necessity.”

— Anne Enright

28. “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.”

— Anne Enright

29. “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.”

— Anne Enright

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

— Anne Enright

31. “No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can’t walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be.”

— Anne Enright

32. “I wait for the kind of sense that dawn makes, when you have not slept.”

— Anne Enright

33. “Try to be accurate about stuff.”

— Anne Enright

34. “I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.”

— Anne Enright

35. “All children are beautiful: the thing they do with their eyes that seems so dazzling when they take you all in, or seem to take you all in; it’s like being looked at by an alien, or a cat – who knows what they see?”

— Anne Enright

36. “I have no place left to live but in my own heart.”

— Anne Enright

37. “I have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer.”

— Anne Enright

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

— Anne Enright

39. “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

40. “If you think about it, the youngest part of the tree is in the very middle. It is the little dot that will widen into a ring, next year. The youngest part of any tree is the heart.”

— Anne Enright

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

— Anne Enright

42. “Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.”

— Anne Enright

43. “Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.”

— Anne Enright

44. “Up and down’ is Irish for anything at all – from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually ‘not quite herself’.”

— Anne Enright

45. “There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.”

— Anne Enright

46. “Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you’re telling a story you’re telling it into someone’s ear.”

— Anne Enright

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

47. “I took my bag, and the suitcase of clothes, and I took the thing he wanted most – a little boy, maybe, as yet unmade; a sturdy little runaround fella, for sitting on his shoulders, and video games down the arcade, and football in the park.”

— Anne Enright

48. “Far below were the limestone flats they called the Flaggy Shore; grey rocks under a grey sky, and there were days when the sea was a glittering grey and your eyes could not tell if it was dusk or dawn, your eyes were always adjusting. It was like the rocks took the light and hid it away. And that was the thing about Boolavaun, it was a place that made itself hard to see.”

— Anne Enright

49. “I’m quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.”

— Anne Enright

50. “Having kids is very difficult to do on your own, and it’s really crazy difficult to think you’re doing it as a team and to find out that you’re not actually part of a team.”

— Anne Enright