Ann Patchett Quotes
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It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.
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I decided to make my living as a magazine writer. And I found that it was really easy and fun.
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I know that there are people out there who believe we should get rid of all guns.
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Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
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My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."
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I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.
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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.
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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.
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I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.
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The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen.
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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.
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It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.
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I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.
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shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us
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He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over one's heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description. At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained!
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The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.
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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.
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If I was a waitress, I was too tired at the end of the day when I came home to try to write.
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Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
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Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.
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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.
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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.
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In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.
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I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.
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Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.
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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.
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Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for.
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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.
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Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.
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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.
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