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Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Life
Hadn
Necessarily
Gone
Wrong
Didn
Mean
Way
Things
Planned

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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I know that there are people out there who believe we should get rid of all guns.
Ann Patchett
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Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.
Ann Patchett
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The idea I pursue is the one that keeps coming back to me. The characters I think about as I'm falling asleep at night or when I'm driving to the grocery store are the one's I wind up writing about.
Ann Patchett
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I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write.
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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Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.
Ann Patchett
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I certainly have written a lot about police in my life, and it's not only something that I know about, but always something that interests me.
Ann Patchett
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People always say, Can writing be taught? I always think, I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to do dialogue, how to do character, but I can't teach you how to be a decent person, and I can't teach you how to have something to say.
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 can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend. You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer. You can't say, I'm too busy writing to be political. You are one person. You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.
Ann Patchett
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You can't spend your whole life in front of a screen.
Ann Patchett
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In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.
Ann Patchett
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Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.
Ann Patchett
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I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.
Ann Patchett
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I don't want to stand with somebody's praise.
Ann Patchett
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No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.
Ann Patchett
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You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.
Ann Patchett
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I really do think that our subconscious gets corrupted with fear, and fear is how news media - all media - makes us [watch] long enough to get to the Tide commercial. That's all it's about. Generating fear so that we can buy the proper laundry detergent.
Ann Patchett
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If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.
Ann Patchett
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Fiction is always really a labor.
Ann Patchett