Tana French
Tana French
Tana Frenchis an Irish novelist and theatrical actress. Her debut novel In the Woods, a psychological mystery, won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards for best first novel. She lives in Dublin...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
CountryIreland
writing lucky feels
I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day.
needs fifty nine
If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.
acting months week
With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.
life-changing writing forever
I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.
girl spring war
...and our footsteps rang and echoed till it sounded like the room was full of dancers, the house calling up all the people who had danced here across centuries of spring evenings, gallant girls seeing gallant boys off to war, old men and women straight-backed while outside their world disintegrated and the new one battered at their doors, all of them bruised and all of them laughing, welcoming us into their long lineage.
hard ifs
Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.
running fall fighting
... I stayed because running seemed too strange and too complicated. All I knew was how to fall back, find a patch of solid ground, and then dig my heels in and fight to start over.
self people giving
People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it's all backwards. It's not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.
hands giving credit
But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.
tragedy facts enough
One of my da's tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life.
people and-love too-much
When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them
hours throwing company
I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.
people hell
Sarte was right, Hell is other people
together shapes patterns
When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.