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I know where I'm going. And if I don't know where I'm going, I don't tend to get anywhere.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Anywhere
Tend
Going

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.
Ann Patchett
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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
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Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
Ann Patchett
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This is my job, my livelihood: the health and the well-being of the publishing industry. We're all responsible for this.
Ann Patchett
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You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.
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.
Ann Patchett
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Fiction is always really a labor.
Ann Patchett
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You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.
Ann Patchett
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No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
Ann Patchett
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He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.
Ann Patchett
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When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.
Ann Patchett
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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
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The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.
Ann Patchett
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Everybody believes in chance.
Ann Patchett
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It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.
Ann Patchett
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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
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I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.
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
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If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.
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.
Ann Patchett