“He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in tu...”
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Author detail
Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California, and moved with her family to Nashville, Tennessee at age six. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1990, during a residential fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1992. Her second novel, Taft (1994), was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction. Her fourth novel, Bel Canto (2001), won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, and sold over a million copies in the United States. Her memoir, Truth & Beauty, which chronicled her relationship with Lucy Grealy during Grealy's death from cancer, was published in 2004. She was the editor for Best American Short Stories 2006.
Quotes
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“He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in tu...”
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“For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the an...”
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“Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this, because it is the key to making art and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happi...”
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“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 somebo...”
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“Girls and their dates still got dressed to go to the Apollo for amateur night but by 1968 pretty much every representation of hope in the country had been put up against a wall and shot.”
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“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.”
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“I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe w...”
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“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.”
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“The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.”
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“It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream w...”
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“Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.”
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“The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.”
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“It was not as natural as it appeared. It was more like milking a cow, easy as long as someone else was doing it.”
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“Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.”
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“Listen she said, everything ends, every single relationship you will ever have in your lifetime is going to end.... I'll die, you'll die, you'll get tired of each other. You don't always kno...”
“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 fo...”
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“People gave me such a bad time about wanting a baby. I didn't want a baby, and I still don't. I wanted a dog.”
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“I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tubercul...”
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“Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy m...”
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“My degree of closeness to my step-siblings varies among the seven, but I have a great sense of loyalty to all of them, especially the four from my childhood. If those people needed my help,...”
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