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One must not be shy where language is concerned.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Concerned
Language
Must
Shy

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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I decided to make my living as a magazine writer. And I found that it was really easy and fun.
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Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.
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Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?
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It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.
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Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.
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Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
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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.
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Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.
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Fiction is always really a labor.
Ann Patchett
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Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.
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You are always someones favorite unfolding story
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I am not mature enough as a reader to enjoy a book in which I hate all the people.
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Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.
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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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It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.
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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
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The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive.
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I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.
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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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