Quote

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

Ann Patchett

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Going
Willing
Imagination
Break
Beauty
Starks
Words
Stark
Living
Trading
Writing
Disappointment
Heart
Hearts

More quotes by Ann Patchett

Image
That's one of the many things about having the bookstore that I adore. I can walk into the store and say to somebody, I'm glad you're reading this book or I'm glad you're getting this book or Don't get that book. I read that book and hated that book. Let's get you this book instead.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
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.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.
Ann Patchett
Image
If you want to write and can't figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame
Ann Patchett
Image
No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do
Ann Patchett
Image
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.
Ann Patchett
Image
Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.
Ann Patchett
Image
I have been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people.
Ann Patchett
Image
That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.
Ann Patchett
Image
This is my job, my livelihood: the health and the well-being of the publishing industry. We're all responsible for this.
Ann Patchett
Image
My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.
Ann Patchett
Image
Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.
Ann Patchett
Image
When I am emperor, I will abolish private education. Private schools, private college. All of these parents with money and energy and the drive for bake sales and a desire to leave their vast fortunes to education - everybody would have to be eating out of the same educational pot.
Ann Patchett
Image
My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society.
Ann Patchett
Image
I was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.
Ann Patchett
Image
The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.
Ann Patchett