Ann Patchett Quotes

We have different kinds of intimacy with many, many people. I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.

Guns are dangerous and damaging even when no one gets shot. They really do loom.

Everybody believes in chance.

That's the way I work. I get it all plotted in my mind, and then I write it down.

I know where I'm going. And if I don't know where I'm going, I don't tend to get anywhere.

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.

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.

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

I decided to make my living as a magazine writer. And I found that it was really easy and fun.

Fiction is always really a labor.

If I was a waitress, I was too tired at the end of the day when I came home to try to write.

I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.

You can't spend your whole life in front of a screen.

You can't say, "I'm too busy writing to be political." You are one person.

That's important to me, to recommend books.

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.

This is my job, my livelihood: the health and the well-being of the publishing industry. We're all responsible for this.

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."

Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.

We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.

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

Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.

You should not have assault rifles in your home.

I know that there are people out there who believe we should get rid of all guns.

I don't want to stand with somebody's praise.

I always used to be an inside person, and now I'm an outside person.

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

I'm very sentimental about lobsters. The last lobster I ate was the only lobster I cooked.

I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.

I tend to keep my ideas in my head. When I write something down in a notebook it's never centralized. There are too many notebooks floating around, but maybe that's a good thing.

My writing process has changed because it's harder to find uninterrupted time.

The idea I pursue is the one that keeps coming back to me. The characters I think about as I'm falling asleep at night or when I'm driving to the grocery store are the one's I wind up writing about.

Hope is a horrible thing, you know. It's a plague. It's like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and someone just keep pulling it and pulling it."STATE OF WONDER

The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.

The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.

The entire time Albie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as “the stripper soundtra

Always remember, any book you haven’t read is still a new book.

... the story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.

Katsumi Hosokawa - (he) believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music.

The two sisters were connected by neither love nor mutual affinity but by a very small bathroom that could be entered from the bedroom on either side.

Oh, my love, ' she said. 'What do the only children do?''We'll never have to know.

Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job.

Zen- Dojo Tozan was not in Sarnen or Thu but somewhere between the two, not in a village but in the tall grass and blue flowers.

He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person.

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

He was so close to her then that they owned every molecule of air in the tiny room and the air grew heavy with their desire and worked to move them together.

She didn't know how to hate her mother yet, but every time she left her father crying in the airport she came that much closer to figuring it out.