Ann Patchett Quotes

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.

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.

Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.

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

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

You are always someones favorite unfolding story

Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

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.

You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.

Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.

There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

I am not mature enough as a reader to enjoy a book in which I hate all the people.

Staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.

It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.

Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.

Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.

I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.

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.

I am a totally public person.

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.

There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

I will write my way into another life.

In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.

Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.

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.

If you've had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins.

I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.

Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.

Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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