Ann Patchett
The '70s were a different time as far as parenting was concerned. People left their kids in the car with the windows cracked while they went to the grocery store.Collection: Parenting
Writing is an amazing place to hide, to go into the rabbit hole, and pull the trap door down over your head.Collection: Amazing
I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.
I have been shown so much kindness in my life, so for me to write books about good, kind people seems completely natural.
I'm just such a Luddite, and I want to write books about Luddites.
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.
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.
People gave me such a bad time about wanting a baby. I didn't want a baby, and I still don't. I wanted a dog.
I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.
You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds up having a huge effect on me. If only my parents had been taking me to Kurosawa films when I was eight, but no.
Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.
I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.
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 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 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.
I think it's brain chemistry. I'm a positive, cheerful person, and I think it is absolutely the luck of the draw. I think the life I have had has come largely from the chemicals in my head. I see my life as good, and I think, a lot of times, if you see your life as good, then that's how it turns out.
I think I would probably have been a good mother.
My favorite thing about Nashville is the parks.
Anyone who doesn't read doesn't have any business writing.
I don't really cry.
I had a real computer solitaire problem. I'd gotten to the point where I had to win a game before I could write, and each time I got up to get a cup of water, I had to win a game. It was a nightmare.
I don't know how to write a novel in the world of cellphones. I don't know how to write a novel in the world of Google, in which all factual information is available to all characters. So I have to stand on my head to contrive a plot in which the characters lose their cellphone and are separated from technology.
I'd like to read all of Proust.
I kissed John Updike as he presented me with an award. It wasn't the best kiss as far as kisses go, but I hold the fact that I kissed John Updike, that he kissed me, very close to my heart.
I've never had a terrible job. I've been a cook, waitress, bookseller, teacher, freelance writer. I know what the bad jobs are, and I haven't done them.
I believe I can solve others' problems. It's great when it works, but for the most part, it's very unappealing.
In my experience, surgeons tend to need boatloads of attention.
My father was a police officer in Los Angeles.
I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.
I've been writing the same book my whole life - that you're in one family, and all of a sudden, you're in another family, and it's not your choice, and you can't get out.
I go through long periods of time when I don't write, and I'm fine.
I think someone gets stitches in all my novels.
You learn every time you write a book, and then you take that new knowledge and experience into the next book. Hopefully, every time, you raise the bar.
Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.Collection: Sight
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.Collection: Thinking
No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we doCollection: Book
Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Block
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.Collection: Grief
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.Collection: Live Life
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.Collection: Running
Everyone knows everything eventually.Collection: Knows
Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.Collection: Dense
Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.Collection: Life
Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and 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.Collection: Reading
You are always someones favorite unfolding storyCollection: Stories
If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.Collection: Trying