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It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.
Ann Patchett
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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
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Novelist
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LA
California
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More quotes by Ann Patchett
Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.
Ann Patchett
The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.
Ann Patchett
Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.
Ann Patchett
I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.
Ann Patchett
Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.
Ann Patchett
I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.
Ann Patchett
I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.
Ann Patchett
reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.
Ann Patchett
You should not have assault rifles in your home.
Ann Patchett
Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.
Ann Patchett
He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.
Ann Patchett
If what we want to do is promote reading and writing and publishing and making sure this is a business that keeps going - because it is a business! It's not just an art - then we have to take responsibility. I get sort of crazy and frothy when I think about this. It really matters.
Ann Patchett
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
I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
Ann Patchett
I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.
Ann Patchett
I always used to be an inside person, and now I'm an outside person.
Ann Patchett
It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.
Ann Patchett
We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.
Ann Patchett
When you get divorced and remarried, nobody gets discarded. Everybody is still there. Even if their storyline is not directly yours.
Ann Patchett
Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.
Ann Patchett