Ann Patchett Quotes - Page 3

You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend. You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer. You can't say, "I'm too busy writing to be political." You are one person. You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.

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.

Learn to write by writing

If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.

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.

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.

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.

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

When you get divorced and remarried, nobody gets discarded. Everybody is still there. Even if their storyline is not directly yours.

Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.

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

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

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

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

That's important to me, to recommend books.

I'm very comfortable writing.

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

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.

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.

I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.

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.

Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.

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

Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.