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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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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Everything
Writing
Life
Quiet
Wall
Write
Keep
Around
Used

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, You have no need for sight. Listen.
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Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.
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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.
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Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.
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I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.
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No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
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Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.
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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.
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If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.
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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.
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There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.
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I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.
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shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us
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That's the way I work. I get it all plotted in my mind, and then I write it down.
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Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.
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I am sure every writer has this and probably every newscaster, that people are always coming up to me and saying, my daughter wants to do what you do, my godson, my tennis partner.
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If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.
Ann Patchett
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The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.
Ann Patchett
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This is my job, my livelihood: the health and the well-being of the publishing industry. We're all responsible for this.
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