Quote

I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.

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
Book
Favorite
Take
Telling
Giving
Books
Thing
Read
Love
Force
World
Away
People
Give
Better

More quotes by Ann Patchett

Image
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.
Ann Patchett
Image
shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us
Ann Patchett
Image
I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.
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.
Ann Patchett
Image
I don't want to stand with somebody's praise.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.
Ann Patchett
Image
I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.
Ann Patchett
Image
I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.
Ann Patchett
Image
My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.
Ann Patchett
Image
I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.
Ann Patchett
Image
Everyone knows everything eventually.
Ann Patchett
Image
Even though I didn't know I was applying for the job, I have somehow become the spokesperson for independent book stores.
Ann Patchett
Image
Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
Ann Patchett
Image
It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.
Ann Patchett