Anne Tyler

“I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.”

“For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.”

“I've always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals. I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?”

“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.”

“My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.”

“It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.”

“It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”

“The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest.”

“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.”

“When I'm working on something, I proceed as if no one else will ever read it.”

“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 forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing.”

“The trouble with discarding bad memories was that evidently the good ones went with them”

“For once, the tears wouldn't come. She saw that Michael might have been right. It really could be too cold to snow.”

“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.”

“Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler’s body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call him handsome, although all the women did. Really he was almost ugly, but in a stirring, thrilling way that made her shift in her seat as she thought about him.”

“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.”

“The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.”

“I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.”

“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.”