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You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Good
Jerk
Writer
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More quotes by 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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He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.
Ann Patchett
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I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.
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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I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.
Ann Patchett
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It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.
Ann Patchett
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The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.
Ann Patchett
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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
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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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I will write my way into another life.
Ann Patchett
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I am a totally public person.
Ann Patchett
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There was such an incredible logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again.
Ann Patchett
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Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.
Ann Patchett
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I should figure out why I'm so much more interested in doing something that I think is really hard. But, somehow, the thing that is hard for me feels more noble.
Ann Patchett
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One must not be shy where language is concerned.
Ann Patchett
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Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.
Ann Patchett
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I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.
Ann Patchett
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Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.
Ann Patchett
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When I am emperor, I will abolish private education. Private schools, private college. All of these parents with money and energy and the drive for bake sales and a desire to leave their vast fortunes to education - everybody would have to be eating out of the same educational pot.
Ann Patchett
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I have been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people.
Ann Patchett