Ann Patchett quotes

I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens. (Ann Patchett)
Praise and criticism seem to me to operate exactly on the same level. If you get a great review, it's really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review, it's really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on.
Ann Patchett
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
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
Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.
Ann Patchett
Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
Ann Patchett
reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.
Ann Patchett
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.
Ann Patchett
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
I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.
Ann Patchett
I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write. (Ann Patchett)
I don't really do anything with the Internet except check my email. I have a much higher opinion of humanity because of that.
Ann Patchett
This is my job, my livelihood: the health and the well-being of the publishing industry. We're all responsible for this.
Ann Patchett
Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.
Ann Patchett
Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.
Ann Patchett
You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.
Ann Patchett
Everyone knows everything eventually.
Ann Patchett
You can't always trust what you think, what you know ... but you can always trust your nature.
Ann Patchett
The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.
Ann Patchett
No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do.
Ann Patchett
If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen. (Ann Patchett)
Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.
Ann Patchett
I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.
Ann Patchett
Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.
Ann Patchett
If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene.
Ann Patchett