D. J. Enright Quotes

People do not change, they are merely revealed.

An authentic and ingenious account of the ingeniously counterfeit in art and in life.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

All I asked for was equality and independence. A rotating chairmanship might have been the answer.

There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.

I’m really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don’t confuse the issues really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.

We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.

I have no place left to live but in my own heart.

The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.

Never plan a picnic' Father said. 'Plan a dinner, yes, or a house, or a budget, or an appointment with the dentist, but never, never plan a picnic.

In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.

Try to be accurate about stuff.

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

I am interested in silences

a certain red cardinal sounded like a little bottle being filled up, up, up with some clear liquid.

I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.

I have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer.

One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised

When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.

We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.

Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.

I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.

I think it’s very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.

I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.

I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.

The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.

I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.

Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on someone to make them subtle.

There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch; as loving or as horrible.

No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can't walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be.

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe.

The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.

When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.

I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.

There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.

I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead

A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking.

Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.

If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. Its the people who are always on the brink of crisis who dont hit bottom who are in trouble.