Ann Patchett Quotes - Page 5

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

Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.

[I remember going] to a hotel gym at six o'clock in the morning, and the television was on, and it's some drama in which two men have clearly kidnapped a woman. They're interrogating her, and they put a plastic bag over her head. They're suffocating her, and I'm thinking, It's six o'clock in the morning! Why does anybody need to see this? How can I find the off switch?

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.

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!

The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.

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.

It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.

Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.

I really do think that our subconscious gets corrupted with fear, and fear is how news media - all media - makes us [watch] long enough to get to the Tide commercial. That's all it's about. Generating fear so that we can buy the proper laundry detergent.

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 don't want to stand with somebody's praise. Whereas now when people come up to me, they say, "I love the bookstore" and "Kids! Come here, come here! This is the woman who owns the bookstore." That's incredible. I can say to that, "Thank you for shopping local. Thank you for coming in. What are you reading? Let's talk about books." It's about something I'm doing as opposed to somehow something I am. I feel comfortable and positive in that role. Because it's about reading. It's about books. It's about learning. It's about business and tax base.

We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.

Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.

If what we want to do is promote reading and writing and publishing and making sure this is a business that keeps going - because it is a business! It's not just an art - then we have to take responsibility. I get sort of crazy and frothy when I think about this. It really matters.

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

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

The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen.

You can't say, "I'm too busy writing to be political." You are one person.

You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.

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

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

If anybody had shown me the paperwork for how my life was going to look in five years, I would have said, "No. That is not where I want to go."

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.