Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002 for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include Run, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, State of Wonder, and The Magician's Assistant, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and received the Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award in 1994...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 December 1963
CountryUnited States of America
Ann Patchett quotes about
It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.
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.
Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen.
I decided to make my living as a magazine writer. And I found that it was really easy and fun.
Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. … It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.
No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.
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.
To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall .... [p.218 ff.]
I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.
For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.
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.
Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?
I know where I'm going. And if I don't know where I'm going, I don't tend to get anywhere.