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
I decided to make my living as a magazine writer. And I found that it was really easy and fun.
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.
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.
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?
There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.
He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.
The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.
That's the way I work. I get it all plotted in my mind, and then I write it down.
If you've had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins.
Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for.
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.
Everybody believes in chance.