Anne Enright Quotes

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

I think people respond to dystopian stories because they're ways of acting out anxieties that we have and fears that we have about the future. So much media's coming at you over the Internet, your brain gets overloaded. You don't know what to do with it. And one thing you can do with it is read a story.

It's the reason we go to films and watch television: to escape the mundane nature of life and see another world and see ourselves in that other world. I think that's what sci-fi does so well.

All writers are obviously neurotic... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.

These are all personal crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It's as simple as that.

It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

I like to be prepared enough to be completely unprepared. I don't know if I make sense, but I have a fantasy of living someone else's life. And to do that perfectly, I need to prepare myself just as properly.

When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.

I love fantasy. I love horror. I love musicals. Whatever doesn't really happen in life is what I'm interested in. As a way of commenting on everything that does happen in life, because ultimately the only thing I'm really interested in is people.

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.

I don't like drama in my life, but I like reading about it.

I love the ultimate escapism of paranormal and fantasy - all of the otherworldly creatures, magic, and possibilities that transport both reader and writer away from reality for a while - it's such delicious fun!

I like to live in my own mind, regardless of everyone and everything, working out the intimate puzzles that are my stories and novels.

I feel like Mills and Boon saved my life. It was a way of not living. I read a lot of other books as well, but they were definitely the best for just switching my brain off, not having to deal with reality.

My mind is in another planet behind the blocks. Sometimes I'm up in the blocks, and I'm like, 'What am I doing here?' I'm just not trying to think too much.

My portal to another world was fiction.

To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.

Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.

The Sims is an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are, which is why I thought this game was made precisely for me.

That's part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.

Fictions are necessary for the people, and the Truth becomes deadly to those who are not strong enough to contemplate it in all its brilliance. In fact, what can there be in common between the vile multitude and sublime wisdom? The Truth must be kept secret, and the masses need a teaching proportioned to their imperfect reason.

In a story, you can turn to the front and begin again and everyone lives once more. That doesn't work in real life. And I love my real people the most.

Back when I was very small, and we had this bathroom with these sort of paneled mirrors on the side. And I would just sit there - because it was the only warm room in the house. And I would - if I was in a bad place - I would go to my imaginary place with these mirrors, and create this entire other world to sort of help level out what I was dealing with.

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.