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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
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Novelist
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LA
California
Jerk
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More quotes by Ann Patchett

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There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.
Ann Patchett
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Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.
Ann Patchett
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In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.
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
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My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.
Ann Patchett
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There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. A kiss, another kiss.
Ann Patchett
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Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
Ann Patchett
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Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.
Ann Patchett
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When you get divorced and remarried, nobody gets discarded. Everybody is still there. Even if their storyline is not directly yours.
Ann Patchett
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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
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Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.
Ann Patchett
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I will go and speak at rotary clubs. I will go and speak at schools. I'm so much in the community, but in a way that I love. It's been such a positive thing.
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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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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I certainly have written a lot about police in my life, and it's not only something that I know about, but always something that interests me.
Ann Patchett
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I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
Ann Patchett
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That's one of the many things about having the bookstore that I adore. I can walk into the store and say to somebody, I'm glad you're reading this book or I'm glad you're getting this book or Don't get that book. I read that book and hated that book. Let's get you this book instead.
Ann Patchett
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Show kindness whenever possible. Show it to the people in front of you, the people coming up behind you, and the people with whom you are running neck and neck. It will vastly improve the quality of your own life, the lives of others, and the state of the world.
Ann Patchett
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shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us
Ann Patchett
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Fiction is always really a labor.
Ann Patchett