Quotes from Ann Patchett

Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.

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.

The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.

Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.

Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.

shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us

She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.

I certainly have written a lot about police in my life, and it's not only something that I know about, but always something that interests me.

You can't spend your whole life in front of a screen.

You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.

I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.

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.

I think I would probably have been a good mother.

In my life, I have met astonishingly good people.

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?

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.

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

It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

My writing process has changed because it's harder to find uninterrupted time.

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

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