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Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Nonfiction
Fiction
Easy
Hard

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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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
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Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
Ann Patchett
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It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.
Ann Patchett
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The love between humans is the thing that nails us to the earth.
Ann Patchett
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There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.
Ann Patchett
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It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.
Ann Patchett
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There was such an incredible logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again.
Ann Patchett
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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
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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
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Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
Ann Patchett
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Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.
Ann Patchett
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Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.
Ann Patchett
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reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.
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
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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
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You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.
Ann Patchett
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That's the way I work. I get it all plotted in my mind, and then I write it down.
Ann Patchett
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I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.
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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If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene.
Ann Patchett