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
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.
How plotless real life was!
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.
In real life I avoid all parties altogether, but on paper I can mingle with the best of them
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.
She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her view of them
The first-person viewpoint is more enjoyable to write, because it lets me meander more freely, and it can reveal more of the character's self-delusions. Really all the advantages are with first-person, so I'm sorry I don't get to pick and choose.
There's surprisingly little difference between writing from a male angle and from a female angle, but I feel more restricted in my language when I'm writing as a male character because males tend to sound less emotionally expressive than females.
Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged.
Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.
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.
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away
I spend about a year between novels