Anne Enright Quotes

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

My attitude is that if anybody of any age wants to read a book, let them, but I do think that no child would want to read 'Boneland.'

My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

I hate to badmouth any book or writer, because I know how it feels to be on the other end of that.

I hate reading reviews.

My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like. For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.

It is usual to speak in a playfully apologetic tone about one's adult enjoyment of what are called 'children's books.' I think the convention a silly one. No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty-except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all. A mature palate will probably not much care for crème de menthe: but it ought still to enjoy bread and butter and honey.

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

Who shall dispute what the Reviewers say? Their word's sufficient; and to ask a reason, In such a state as theirs, is downright treason.

There are books that one needs maturity to enjoy just as there are books an adult can come on too late to savor.

No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.

The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books, or write opinion pieces about what they think of Neil Young, or why they quit watching ER or whatever. And because of that, I think there's a lot of people who write about my books with the premise of, "Why this guy? Why not me?"

No publisher should ever express an opinion of the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

Confusing the author and the character seems to be a popular and rather unsophisticated reaction to books.

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.