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's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.
Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.
Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
You are always someones favorite unfolding story
There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. A kiss, another kiss.
The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.
Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.
I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.
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.
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.
We have different kinds of intimacy with many, many people. I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.
You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.