Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Person
Important
Novelist
Trying
Entertain
Time
Novelists
Think
Boring
Thinking
Grow
Grows
Persons

More quotes by Ann Patchett

Image
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
Image
Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.
Ann Patchett
Image
Guns are dangerous and damaging even when no one gets shot. They really do loom.
Ann Patchett
Image
I always used to be an inside person, and now I'm an outside person.
Ann Patchett
Image
Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.
Ann Patchett
Image
I will go and speak at rotary clubs. I will go and speak at schools. I'm so much in the community, but in a way that I love. It's been such a positive thing.
Ann Patchett
Image
Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.
Ann Patchett
Image
You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend. You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer. You can't say, I'm too busy writing to be political. You are one person. 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
Image
My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.
Ann Patchett
Image
When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.
Ann Patchett
Image
I really do think that our subconscious gets corrupted with fear, and fear is how news media - all media - makes us [watch] long enough to get to the Tide commercial. That's all it's about. Generating fear so that we can buy the proper laundry detergent.
Ann Patchett
Image
Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.
Ann Patchett
Image
The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.
Ann Patchett
Image
Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.
Ann Patchett
Image
Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.
Ann Patchett
Image
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