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

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

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.
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The love between humans is the thing that nails us to the earth.
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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.
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It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.
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You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.
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That's important to me, to recommend books.
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If I was a waitress, I was too tired at the end of the day when I came home to try to write.
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Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?
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The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.
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If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.
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No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
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When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
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I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.
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No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.
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There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.
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Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.
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It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.
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You can't spend your whole life in front of a screen.
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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.
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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.
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