Quote

If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Person
Quiet
Feels
Seem
Life
Wants
Complain
Freedom
Tends
Else
Complaining
Seems
Wanting
Anything
Begins
Persons
Secure

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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I don't really do anything with the Internet except check my email. I have a much higher opinion of humanity because of that.
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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.
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Learn to write by writing
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Praise and criticism seem to me to operate exactly on the same level. If you get a great review, it's really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review, it's really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on.
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I'm very sentimental about lobsters. The last lobster I ate was the only lobster I cooked.
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Everyone knows everything eventually.
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I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.
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The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.
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There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.
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No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
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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.
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When you get divorced and remarried, nobody gets discarded. Everybody is still there. Even if their storyline is not directly yours.
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I tend to keep my ideas in my head. When I write something down in a notebook it's never centralized. There are too many notebooks floating around, but maybe that's a good thing.
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Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.
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I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
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You should not have assault rifles in your home.
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