Anne Enright Quotes

I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.

'Invisible Man' holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.

I've enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something.

The toughest thing about being a celebrity, I suppose, is being polite when I don't want to be.

People always want me to talk about Wonder Woman, so I do.

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.

I don't feel comfortable with the kind of celebrity that has come my way - and I'm not very good at it, either.

I want a private life, I truly do. I'm not just pretending to want one like lots of celebrities.

There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful.

I'm probably better known for boxing with Hemingway than for anything I've written.

I've been offered all the reality TV shows but have turned them down. If I did it as 'Johnny,' there'd be no jungle left! It was really hard regaining control of myself, so I am reluctant to let 'Johnny' back out of the box.

The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems.

My greatest fear is disappointing the reader, so each book has to be better than the one before.

I made an awful mess of my first marriage. It was hard to live with me being me. I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn't struggled. I couldn't suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of those guys were struggling to make a couple of thousand pounds a year.

One of the ironies of being a professional writer is that, if you are even moderately successful, the very traits that let you succeed as a writer are not much help when the time comes to head out as 'The Author.'

One of the strangest results of having your name on a book jacket is the proliferation of people who know one narrow aspect of your life and are suddenly surprised to learn there's more.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

I became very famous, as a teenager, and my name and photo were splashed in all the media. They made me larger than life, so I wanted to live larger than life, and the only way to do that was to be intoxicated.

When you become a public figure, you still think, 'That's really not me; there's more to me than that.'

I know I walk a fine line between being a respected actor and being what they call a sex symbol.

The hardest thing in the world for a writer is to amass a readership. So many good books come out, and so many good books disappear.

It's strange - there's a public persona of me that does nothing for me: the side of me where it's 'US Weekly,' where 12 cars sit outside my house because of who I married. That side never shuts off. I would like that to shut off sometimes, yes.

I'm so tired of hearing about 'Renascence,' I'm nearly dead. I find it's as hard to live down an early triumph as an early indiscretion.

I think there's a time when your personal life gets magnified by who we are as celebrities.

Basically, I still have the privacy that all celebrities crave, except for those celebrities who feel that privacy reflects some kind of failure on their part.