Ann Patchett Quotes

Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.

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

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

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

I think that people all grow up and have their same personalities, but you can say, "Oh, I can see the roots of this personality, which I didn't like, but then you grew up, and I can still see you as that person, but I do really like you now." Which is sort of how I feel about children - I mean, about children who I knew when I was a child and grew up with, and they're still my friends, and children that I know as children who I see growing up, and every year I like them more.

If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene.

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

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

There was such an incredible logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again.

I will write my way into another life.

That is one thing I've learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try to call on it, just like a lightbulb cracking off when you throw the switch.

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

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.

Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

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.

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.]

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.

If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.

Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.

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.

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

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

For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive.

Listen she said, everything ends, every single relationship you will ever have in your lifetime is going to end.... I'll die, you'll die, you'll get tired of each other. You don't always know how it's going to happen, but it is always going to happen. So stop trying to make everything permanent, it doesn't work. I want you to go out there and find some nice man you have no intention of spending the rest of your life with. You can be very, very happy with people you aren't going to marry.

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

I'm very comfortable writing.

Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.

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

Fiction is always really a labor.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

You are always someones favorite unfolding story

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

People always say, "Can writing be taught?" I always think, I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to do dialogue, how to do character, but I can't teach you how to be a decent person, and I can't teach you how to have something to say.

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.

I have been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people.

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

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."

Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand.

You should not have assault rifles in your home.

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.