Quote

Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.

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
Sells
Discipline
Looking
Write
Art
Writing
Something
Love
Sell

More quotes by Ann Patchett

Image
Show kindness whenever possible. Show it to the people in front of you, the people coming up behind you, and the people with whom you are running neck and neck. It will vastly improve the quality of your own life, the lives of others, and the state of the world.
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
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.
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
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
Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
Ann Patchett
Image
If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.
Ann Patchett
Image
I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.
Ann Patchett
Image
No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
Ann Patchett
Image
Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.
Ann Patchett
Image
I'm very comfortable writing.
Ann Patchett
Image
Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.
Ann Patchett
Image
If anybody had shown me the paperwork for how my life was going to look in five years, I would have said, No. That is not where I want to go.
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
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
Image
There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. A kiss, another kiss.
Ann Patchett
Image
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.
Ann Patchett
Image
Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.
Ann Patchett
Image
I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.
Ann Patchett
Image
Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
Ann Patchett