Quote

Staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Within
Staying
Ability
Disappear
Two
Faster
Giving
Skills
World
Quiet
Gives
Polar
Novel
Empathetic
Alone
Disappearing

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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My writing process has changed because it's harder to find uninterrupted time.
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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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Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.
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Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.
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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.
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You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.
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I should figure out why I'm so much more interested in doing something that I think is really hard. But, somehow, the thing that is hard for me feels more noble.
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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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Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.
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Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.
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She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.
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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.]
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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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Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
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Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
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Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.
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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.
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I'm very comfortable writing.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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