Anne Enright Quotes

A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.

The cool thing about being a songwriter, or a writer, I guess, in general, you can take on a lot of different things, experience a lot of different things, just by writing about them.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

I'm not a purist - I like films that are narrated and films that aren't, films that are beautiful and films that are clumsy but heartfelt. Mostly, I just like a good story and good characters.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

I like those kinds of songs that have details that you remember and that have stories that mean something and that open up into different levels philosophically. I like those kinds of movies, and I like those kinds of books.

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.

I loved the idea of dramatic art of storytelling as a way to make sense of things. It's really what I love and what I care about.

I don't think most of our films should be realistic, but you want that as an artistic possibility. Then, the artist can take the realism of the world and push it in ways that we can connect with.

I'm often a little perplexed, when I read a review of a book, by the quotes that are pulled out as evidence of excellent prose. I don't think great novels are necessarily composed of great prose, or that there's a correlation between beautiful prose and the quality of a work of fiction. A really good, interesting novel will often let a little ugliness get into its words - to create a certain effect, to leave the reader with a certain sense of disorientation.

All poetry is misrepresentation.

If a man writes a brilliant enough play in praise of something that is universally loathed, the play, if it is good and well enough written, should not be knocked down because of its approach to its subject.

For me a film is at its best when you can start filling in the story with your own life experience.

Novels can fill in the spaces about what that emotional resonance is.

An artist is an entertainer, number one - a storyteller who takes people someplace, who gives them what they didn't know they wanted.

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.

A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

If I have ideas, I want to put them in the movie. It's not a minimalist approach at all but I feel like it's for the audience. It's about seeing how much texture we can give it and seeing how many things are there for people to latch on to... I just want to do it the way I want and I feel like it won't be helpful for me if I start worrying about that. I just have to follow my instincts. Everyone is going to respond differently to it and everybody's right - that's their point of view. That's how the story intersects with their lives.

Music and movie scripts are books. You want to be literally moved and that's the sort of things I look for.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.

People get out of music what they want to get out of it, and all I try to do is do the same thing.

You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?'

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

I want to tell stories, I don't really try to get boxed in by a specific genre.