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I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
People
Selling
Become
Book
Need
Needs
Writing
Think
Thinking
Consumed

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over one's heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description. At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained!
Ann Patchett
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Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.
Ann Patchett
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I know where I'm going. And if I don't know where I'm going, I don't tend to get anywhere.
Ann Patchett
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I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.
Ann Patchett
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Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.
Ann Patchett
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You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.
Ann Patchett
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It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.
Ann Patchett
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The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.
Ann Patchett
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You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds up having a huge effect on me. If only my parents had been taking me to Kurosawa films when I was eight, but no.
Ann Patchett
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Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.
Ann Patchett
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Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand.
Ann Patchett
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You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.
Ann Patchett
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Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.
Ann Patchett
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I am sure every writer has this and probably every newscaster, that people are always coming up to me and saying, my daughter wants to do what you do, my godson, my tennis partner.
Ann Patchett
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No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
Ann Patchett
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He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.
Ann Patchett
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Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
Ann Patchett
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She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.
Ann Patchett
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I'm very comfortable writing.
Ann Patchett
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You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.
Ann Patchett