A Quote by Anne Tyler

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. — © Anne Tyler
The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.
If you go out to dinner with a group of people, pay for the dinner at a nice restaurant, for the amount of money for that dinner, you can get a John 5 Squier Telecaster and have it for the rest of your life.
I wanted to write something that was very entertaining to read. The hardest part of this novel [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] was how to make a deeply spiritual transformation journey page-turning and adventurous. That was the hardest part to crack for me.
You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.
I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.
That's the problem. Anyone can go and buy a restaurant. I want to be at that f - ing dinner party where they say, "Hey, Bill, your food's great. You should buy yourself a restaurant." That's not right. Taking it less personally.
I want to be the band everyone knows that goes hardest. Plays the hardest, parties the hardest, lives the hardest, loves the hardest, does everything the hardest, harder than anybody else.
I've talked to Bill Clinton - he's the ultimate rock star; no one's more charming than him. People clap in a restaurant when he finishes dinner! I don't get that treatment. I get it when I walk onstage, but not when I have dinner.
It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.
Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.
To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.
Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.
The hardest thing about moving to California from Connecticut was just missing my family. If I went back, it would be just because I was homesick.
I've never been that person who thought that because I've written one novel, I should write another and another. It's only when there was another novel to write that I was going to write another.
The only time I ever follow Twitter is if I'm in a restaurant or something, just before I leave, to see if people are waiting outside. It does make you a bit of a loser, especially when someone asks you, 'Hey, you want to go to dinner at this place?' and I'm like, 'Can we have dinner at this place? It has three exits.'
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
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