Ann Patchett Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappointment them, or, if they do, the owners manages to forget about it quickly. I want to learn to love people like this, the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way my dog loves me.

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.

He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.

That's important to me, to recommend books.

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

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.

You can't always trust what you think, what you know ... but you can always trust your nature.

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

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.

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.

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.

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.

Show kindness whenever possible. Show it to the people in front of you, the people coming up behind you, and the people with whom you are running neck and neck. It will vastly improve the quality of your own life, the lives of others, and the state of the world.

If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.

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.

Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.

I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.

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

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

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

There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.

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.

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

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

I have seven step-siblings from my mother's second and third marriages. My degree of closeness to my step-siblings varies among the seven but I have a great sense of loyalty to all of them, especially the four from my childhood. If those people needed my help I would be there for them.

He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.

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.

If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.

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.

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

But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.

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

I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.