Top 207 Quotes & Sayings by Ann Patchett

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'd like to read all of Proust.

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 someone gets stitches in all my novels.

I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.

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

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.

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.

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 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?

I go through long periods of time when I don't write, and I'm fine.

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.

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.

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.

I think I would probably have been a good mother.

My favorite thing about Nashville is the parks.

I'm just such a Luddite, and I want to write books about Luddites.

I don't really cry.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

My father was a police officer in Los Angeles.

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.

Anyone who doesn't read doesn't have any business writing.

In my experience, surgeons tend to need boatloads of attention.

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 have been shown so much kindness in my life, so for me to write books about good, kind people seems completely natural.

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.

Writing is an amazing place to hide, to go into the rabbit hole, and pull the trap door down over your head.

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.

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.

In my life, I have met astonishingly good people.

I believe I can solve others' problems. It's great when it works, but for the most part, it's very unappealing.

I will write my way into another life.

Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I've found. 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.

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 do

You are always someones favorite unfolding story

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.

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

There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

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.

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.

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.

If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene.

Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.

It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.

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

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 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.

Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.

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.

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

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.

Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.

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.

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.