Quote

I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.

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
Write
Keep
Around
Used
Everything
Writing
Life
Quiet
Wall

More quotes by Ann Patchett

Image
No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
Ann Patchett
Image
Fiction is always really a labor.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall .... [p.218 ff.]
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
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
Image
Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for.
Ann Patchett
Image
I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.
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
Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.
Ann Patchett
Image
I don't want to stand with somebody's praise.
Ann Patchett
Image
It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
I'm very sentimental about lobsters. The last lobster I ate was the only lobster I cooked.
Ann Patchett
Image
Guns are dangerous and damaging even when no one gets shot. They really do loom.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.
Ann Patchett
Image
In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.
Ann Patchett
Image
Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.
Ann Patchett
Image
I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.
Ann Patchett