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Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Anytime
Cop
Buttons
Priests
Hot
Profession
Professions
Write
Cops
Writing
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More quotes by Ann Patchett

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The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.
Ann Patchett
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If anybody had shown me the paperwork for how my life was going to look in five years, I would have said, No. That is not where I want to go.
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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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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I know where I'm going. And if I don't know where I'm going, I don't tend to get anywhere.
Ann Patchett
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Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.
Ann Patchett
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I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write.
Ann Patchett
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The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.
Ann Patchett
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I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.
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 are always someones favorite unfolding story
Ann Patchett
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Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.
Ann Patchett
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You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.
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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It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.
Ann Patchett
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You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.
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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People always say, Can writing be taught? I always think, I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to do dialogue, how to do character, but I can't teach you how to be a decent person, and I can't teach you how to have something to say.
Ann Patchett
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No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do
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