Top 200 Anne Tyler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If I waited till I felt like writing, I’d never write at all.”

— Anne Tyler

2. “I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”

— Anne Tyler

3. “People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.”

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

5. “I’m beginning to think that maybe it’s not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you’re with them.”

— Anne Tyler

6. “Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

9. “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

10. “Now she settled into the dailiness of grief – not that first piercing stab but the steady, persistent ache of it, the absence that feels like a presence.”

— Anne Tyler

11. “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

12. “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

13. “But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories – all that they take away with them.”

— Anne Tyler

14. “It’s true that writing is 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.”

— Anne Tyler

15. “It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.”

— Anne Tyler

16. “There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you’re safe asleep in someone else’s house.”

— Anne Tyler

17. “When you have children, you’re obligated to live.”

— Anne Tyler

18. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

19. “You know what you remind me of? The telegram Harpo Marx sent his brothers: No message. Harpo.” That made him grin. Sarah said, “You would think it was funny.” “Well? Isn’t it?”

— Anne Tyler

20. “Try Jesus, you won’t regret it, a billboard read.”

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

26. “Cody cut into a huge wedge of pie and gave some thought to food – to its inexplicable, loaded meaning in other people’s lives. Couldn’t you classify a person, he wondered, purely by examining his attitude toward food?”

— Anne Tyler

27. “It was funny, in her old age, to look back and see for how short a period her nest had NOT been empty. Relatively speaking, it was nothing – empty far longer than full. so much of herself had been invested in those children; who could believe how briefly they’d been with her.”

— Anne Tyler

28. “Rose had a kitchen that was so completely alphabetized, you’d find the allspice next to the ant poison. She was a fine one to talk about the Leary men.”

— Anne Tyler

29. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

30. “I’m falling into disrepair.”

— Anne Tyler

31. “The trouble with dying,” she’d told Jeannie once, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.”

— Anne Tyler

32. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

33. “And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren’t for love.”

— Anne Tyler

34. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

35. “It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.”

— Anne Tyler

36. “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!”

— Anne Tyler

37. “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

38. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

39. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

40. “Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I’d always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.”

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

42. “But if you never did anything you couldn’t undo you’d end up doing nothing at all.”

— Anne Tyler

43. “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

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

— Anne Tyler

45. “It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it’s all going to end.”

— Anne Tyler

46. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

47. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

48. “The thing about old girlfriends, Micah reflected, is that each one subtracts something from you. You say goodbye to your first great romance and move on to the next, but you find you have less to give to the next. A little chip of you has gone missing; you’re not quite so wholly there in the new relationship.”

— Anne Tyler

49. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

50. “Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.”

— Anne Tyler