Quotes from Ann Patchett

My favorite thing about Nashville is the parks.

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

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'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.

For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.

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

You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.

You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.

I will write my way into another 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.

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.

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 the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.