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Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Thing
Sight
Never
Advice
Searchers
Objects
Overlooking
Focus
Overlook
Looking
Overlooked
Goal
Objectives
Actually
Findings
Find
Focused

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.
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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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
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Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.
Ann Patchett
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If I was a waitress, I was too tired at the end of the day when I came home to try to write.
Ann Patchett
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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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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 spend your whole life in front of a screen.
Ann Patchett
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Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
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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I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.
Ann Patchett
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Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
Ann Patchett
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I'm very comfortable writing.
Ann Patchett
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I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.
Ann Patchett
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But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.
Ann Patchett
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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
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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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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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No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
Ann Patchett
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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