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When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Nonfiction
Wrote
Personal
Stuff
Best
Work
Really

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand.
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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Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
Ann Patchett
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I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.
Ann Patchett
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I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.
Ann Patchett
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You are always someones favorite unfolding story
Ann Patchett
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Staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.
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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You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.
Ann Patchett
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I decided to make my living as a magazine writer. And I found that it was really easy and fun.
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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Everyone knows everything eventually.
Ann Patchett
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She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.
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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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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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
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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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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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Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.
Ann Patchett
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It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.
Ann Patchett