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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.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Minutes
Reviews
Levels
Crush
Either
Ten
Seems
Criticism
Great
Praise
Crushing
Really
Exactly
Review
Way
Level
Thrilling
Seem
Operate

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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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.
Ann Patchett
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I have seven step-siblings from my mother's second and third marriages. My degree of closeness to my step-siblings varies among the seven but I have a great sense of loyalty to all of them, especially the four from my childhood. If those people needed my help I would be there for them.
Ann Patchett
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The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.
Ann Patchett
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If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.
Ann Patchett
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I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.
Ann Patchett
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There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.
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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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
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I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.
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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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 believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.
Ann Patchett
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I was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.
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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You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.
Ann Patchett
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It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.
Ann Patchett
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I know where I'm going. And if I don't know where I'm going, I don't tend to get anywhere.
Ann Patchett
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I will go and speak at rotary clubs. I will go and speak at schools. I'm so much in the community, but in a way that I love. It's been such a positive thing.
Ann Patchett
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I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.
Ann Patchett
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To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall .... [p.218 ff.]
Ann Patchett