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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.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Trying
Entertain
Time
Novelists
Think
Boring
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Novelist

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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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
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Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for.
Ann Patchett
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I'm very comfortable writing.
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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I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.
Ann Patchett
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If you want to write and can't figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.
Ann Patchett
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I will write my way into another life.
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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Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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
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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.
Ann Patchett
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The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.
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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When you get divorced and remarried, nobody gets discarded. Everybody is still there. Even if their storyline is not directly yours.
Ann Patchett
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You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.
Ann Patchett
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Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.
Ann Patchett
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Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.
Ann Patchett
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Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.
Ann Patchett
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Everybody believes in chance.
Ann Patchett