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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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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Best
Nothing
Work
Life
Afield
Odd
Saws
Fiction
Personal

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.
Ann Patchett
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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
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shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us
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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Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.
Ann Patchett
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There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.
Ann Patchett
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Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.
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 have seven step-siblings from my mother's second and third marriages. My degree of closeness to my step-siblings varies among the seven but I have a great sense of loyalty to all of them, especially the four from my childhood. If those people needed my help I would be there for them.
Ann Patchett
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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
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I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.
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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There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. A kiss, another kiss.
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 am sure every writer has this and probably every newscaster, that people are always coming up to me and saying, my daughter wants to do what you do, my godson, my tennis partner.
Ann Patchett
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We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.
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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When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.
Ann Patchett
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But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.
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