Ann Patchett Quotes

When you get divorced and remarried, nobody gets discarded. Everybody is still there. Even if their storyline is not directly yours.

I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.

The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.

Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.

Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.

Learn to write by writing

Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame

Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?

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.

Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.

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.

For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.

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.

People gave me such a bad time about wanting a baby. I didn't want a baby, and I still don't. I wanted a dog.

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.

It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.

That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.

No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.

I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.

It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen.

You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.

The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.

I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.

Even though I didn't know I was applying for the job, I have somehow become the spokesperson for independent book stores.

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.]

shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us

She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.

Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.

The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.

Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.

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.

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.

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

I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.

I don't really do anything with the Internet except check my email. I have a much higher opinion of humanity because of that.

I was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.

You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.

I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.

I'm very comfortable writing.

The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.

Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.

I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.

I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.