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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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Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.
Ann Patchett
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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.
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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Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.
Ann Patchett
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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
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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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I was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.
Ann Patchett
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We have different kinds of intimacy with many, many people. I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.
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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I certainly have written a lot about police in my life, and it's not only something that I know about, but always something that interests me.
Ann Patchett
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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
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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.]
Ann Patchett
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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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If what we want to do is promote reading and writing and publishing and making sure this is a business that keeps going - because it is a business! It's not just an art - then we have to take responsibility. I get sort of crazy and frothy when I think about this. It really matters.
Ann Patchett
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You can't spend your whole life in front of a screen.
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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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
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Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.
Ann Patchett
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Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.
Ann Patchett
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Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.
Ann Patchett