Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Make
Sleep
Impact
Tuberculosis
People
Place
Shapes
Fur
Happens
Mountain
Influenced
Beautiful
Magic
Sleeping
Give
Stay
Bags
Book
Novel
Several
Giving
Huge
Shape
Years
Loved
Bunch

More quotes by Ann Patchett

Image
Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.
Ann Patchett
Image
I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.
Ann Patchett
Image
Everyone knows everything eventually.
Ann Patchett
Image
Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
Ann Patchett
Image
I tend to keep my ideas in my head. When I write something down in a notebook it's never centralized. There are too many notebooks floating around, but maybe that's a good thing.
Ann Patchett
Image
Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.
Ann Patchett
Image
I always used to be an inside person, and now I'm an outside person.
Ann Patchett
Image
If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.
Ann Patchett
Image
People always say, Can writing be taught? I always think, I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to do dialogue, how to do character, but I can't teach you how to be a decent person, and I can't teach you how to have something to say.
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
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
Image
The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.
Ann Patchett
Image
I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.
Ann Patchett
Image
Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
Ann Patchett
Image
There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.
Ann Patchett
Image
Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.
Ann Patchett