Ann Patchett Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

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

Ann Patchett
I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers.

Ann Patchett
Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

Ann Patchett
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.

Ann Patchett
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.

Ann Patchett
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.

Ann Patchett
But we cannot unbraid the story of another person's life and take out all the parts that don't suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do.

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

Ann Patchett
That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.

Ann Patchett