The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning
Anne TylerRead
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
Interpretation
Good novels highlight the wonder of everyday experiences, while overly analytical interpretations can diminish that sense of mystery.
Anne Tyler suggests that the beauty and intrigue found in everyday life are essential components of good literature. By focusing solely on psychological analysis, one may overlook the deeper, more mysterious qualities that make ordinary experiences profound and meaningful.
In practice
This quote could be included during a book club discussion about the themes in contemporary literature.
The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning
I don't know what takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world.
I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns
I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.
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.
And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren't for love.
We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth.
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