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 never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.
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.
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.
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
You think we're a family,' Cody said, turning back. 'You think we're some jolly, situation-comedy family when we're in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place, and our mother was a witch.
I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.
I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.
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.
Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I'm going to have to think about how it will affect other people.
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.
But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.
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.
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
At most I'll spend three or four hours daily, sometimes less.