Ann Patchett Quotes - Page 2

The love between humans is the thing that nails us to the earth.

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

The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.

I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.

Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

If you want to write and can't figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I will write my way into another life.

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.

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.

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.

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