Author

Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.

From Anne Michaels

I think there are all kinds of aspects to reality, to domestic reality, and why don't we just talk about them all?

From Anne Michaels

There should be a democracy of voices in literature. There are people who live with a kind of striving and with a certain kind of tenderness - it's not an unusual thing - and maybe that's not written about enough.

From Anne Michaels

Certain things can't be approximated, so I'm always interested in getting in another way, one which makes the reader bend in closer to the scene even if that scene, especially if that scene, is painful... Brutal language isn't necessarily the most truthful way of describing a brutal moment.

From Anne Michaels

I'm not being naive; I realise there's no such thing as a pure reading. But I'd rather keep myself as far out of it as I can.

From Anne Michaels

I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life.

From Anne Michaels

I have a profound resistance to the idea that a reader could say, 'Oh, well, that's her story.' We should all be interested, no matter where we come from, or who our parents are. It's not my province; it's ours. These questions concern us all.

From Anne Michaels

I started to write things down, as a very young child, wanting to find a way to remember - to keep close, somehow - moments that made an impression on me.

From Anne Michaels

It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.

From Anne Michaels

I've said this before - and I mean it strongly - an abstract concept or a moral issue has to be connected to feeling. If we don't believe it somehow viscerally, we don't really take it in.

From Anne Michaels

Anne Michaels

Notable Quotes

Authors with Similar Views

China Mieville

Edmund White

Chang-Rae Lee

Chantal Kreviazuk

Charles Scribner, Jr.

Authors with Opposing Views

Aidan Chambers

Anne Tyler

Floyd Skloot

Josh Hutcherson

Ken Russell