10 quotes by Anne Tyler

Best-selling author Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941. She attended Duke University and graduated with a major in Russian which she continued to study at Columbia University. Tyler moved to Montreal in 1964 and worked as an assistant librarian at McGill University Law School while completing her two first novels, "If Morning Ever Comes" (1964) and "The Tin Can Tree" (1965). While her work began to receive notice in the early 1970s, it was not until writers like Gail Godwin and John Updike drew attention to her that her talent as a writer was truly recognized. "Morgan's Passing" (1980) is considered her breakthrough novel. Her best-known works include "Dinner at Homesick Restaurant" (1982), "The Accidental Tourist" (1985), and "Breathing Lessons" (1988), which won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize. While Tyler is a best-selling novelist, she is a highly private person and rarely agrees to interviews or talk show appearances. Her recognition is based almost completely on the quality of her books.    

1. Writing

Photo: Diana Walker/Knopf. CSM copywork.

"I didn't really choose to write; I more or less fell into it."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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