Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler
Anne Tyleris a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published 20 novels, the best known of which are Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, and Breathing Lessons. All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with Breathing Lessons winning the prize for 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 October 1941
CountryUnited States of America
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.
II would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them -- without a though about publication -- and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
At most I'll spend three or four hours daily, sometimes less.
I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.
There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house.
Point of view is not something I consciously decide. Almost always, when I come up with a plot I find that the point of view has automatically arrived with it, part and parcel of the story.
It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
While armchair travelers dream of going places, traveling armchairs dream of staying put.
But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.
...if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.
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
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.
I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.