Quote

I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.

Ann Patchett

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Person
Book
Appropriating
Turning
Mines
Mine
Stories
Persons

More quotes by Ann Patchett

Image
Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.
Ann Patchett
Image
The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, You have no need for sight. Listen.
Ann Patchett
Image
She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.
Ann Patchett
Image
I don't really do anything with the Internet except check my email. I have a much higher opinion of humanity because of that.
Ann Patchett
Image
Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.
Ann Patchett
Image
Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.
Ann Patchett
Image
I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.
Ann Patchett
Image
No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
Ann Patchett
Image
Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
If what we want to do is promote reading and writing and publishing and making sure this is a business that keeps going - because it is a business! It's not just an art - then we have to take responsibility. I get sort of crazy and frothy when I think about this. It really matters.
Ann Patchett
Image
I really do think that our subconscious gets corrupted with fear, and fear is how news media - all media - makes us [watch] long enough to get to the Tide commercial. That's all it's about. Generating fear so that we can buy the proper laundry detergent.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.
Ann Patchett