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Fiction is always really a labor.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Labor
Fiction
Really
Always

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.
Ann Patchett
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I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.
Ann Patchett
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He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.
Ann Patchett
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I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.
Ann Patchett
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If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.
Ann Patchett
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I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.
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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He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over one's heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description. At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained!
Ann Patchett
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But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do.
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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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
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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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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 was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.
Ann Patchett
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When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.
Ann Patchett
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Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.
Ann Patchett
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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
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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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No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.
Ann Patchett
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I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.
Ann Patchett