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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 Tuberculosis, Make Them All Stay In A Fur Sleeping Bag For Several Years And See What Happens.

-Ann Patchett

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I Was Very Influenced

Ann Patchett

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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 Tuberculosis, Make Them All Stay In A Fur Sleeping Bag For Several Years And See What Happens.

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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 Tuberculosis, Make Them All Stay In A Fur Sleeping Bag For Several Years And See What Happens.

I Think Of Nashville As A Very Natural Place. We're Easy Going, We Are Ourselves. There Isn't A Lot Of Preening Or Trying To Impress. So It's An Easy Place To Just Be And That Is A Good State From Which To Write.

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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.

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The Timing Of The Electrical Failure Seemed Dramatic And Perfectly Correct, As If The Lights Had Said, "you Have No Need For Sight. Listen.

He Doesn’t Know To Want For More Because Nothing In His Life Has Been As Much As This...on That Night He Thinks That No One Has Ever Had So Much And Only Later Will He Know He Should Have Asked For More.

That's The Way I Work. I Get It All Plotted In My Mind, And Then I Write It Down.

Love Is A Rebellious Bird That No One Can Tame

The Tricky Thing About Being A Writer, Or About Being Any Kind Of Artist, Is That In Addition To Making Art You Also Have To Make A Living.

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.

Keeping People Safe Is A Story We Tell Ourselves.

I Always Used To Be An Inside Person, And Now I'm An Outside Person.

Society Was Nothing But A Long, Dull Dinner Party Conversation In Which One Was Forced To Speak To One's Partner On Both The Left And The Right.

Anytime You Write About Priests Or Cops, They're Hot-button Professions.

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.

When I Wrote Nonfiction, My Best Work Was The Really Personal Stuff.

I Am Not Mature Enough As A Reader To Enjoy A Book In Which I Hate All The People.

It Was All In My Head And Now All I Had To Do Was Figure Out A Way To Get It Down On Paper.

Maybe There Would Be A Bad Outcome For Some Of The Others, But No One Was Going To Shoot A Soprano.

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.

Art Stands On The Shoulders Of Craft, Which Means That To Get To The Art, You Must Master The Craft.

Write Because You Love The Art And The Discipline, Not Because You're Looking To Sell Something.

Everyone Knows Everything Eventually.

Sometimes If There's A Book You Really Want To Read, You Have To Write It Yourself.

It's Always Better To Have Too Much To Read Than Not Enough.

I Am The Person Who Is Appropriating Stories That Are Not Mine And Turning Them Into A Book.

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 Always Trust What You Think, What You Know ... But You Can Always Trust Your Nature.

The Thing You Can Count On In Life Is That Tennessee Will Always Be Scorching Hot In August.

I'm Very Sentimental About Lobsters. The Last Lobster I Ate Was The Only Lobster I Cooked.

I Should Figure Out Why I'm So Much More Interested In Doing Something That I Think Is Really Hard. But, Somehow, The Thing That Is Hard For Me Feels More Noble.

I Wanted To Eat Her Pain, Take It Into Me And Make It My Own.

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.

Coming Back Is The Thing That Enables You To See How All The Dots In Your Life Are Connected, How One Decision Leads You Another, How One Twist Of Fate, Good Or Bad, Brings You To A Door That Later Takes You To Another Door, Which Aided By Several Detours--long Hallways And Unforeseen Stairwells--eventually Puts You In The Place You Are Now.

If Someone Loves You For What You Can Do Then It's Flattering, But Why Do You Love Them? If Someone Loves You For Who You Are Then They Have To Know You, Which Means You Have To Know Them.

Whenever I Saw Her, I Felt Like I Had Been Living In Another Country, Doing Moderately Well In Another Language, And Then She Showed Up Speaking English And Suddenly I Could Speak With All The Complexity And Nuance That I Hadn't Realized Was Gone. With Lucy I Was A Native Speaker.

It Makes You Wonder. All The Brilliant Things We Might Have Done With Our Lives If Only We Suspected We Knew How.

The Quality Of Gifts Depends On The Sincerity Of The Giver.

For A Man To Know What He Has When He Had It, That Is What Makes Him A Fortunate Man.

My Novels Are Very Much The Same, As I Think Many People's Novels Are. No Matter How Hard I Try To Do Otherwise, The Books Always Wind Up Being "a Group Of Strangers Are Thrown Together By Circumstance And Form A Society."

That Was The Way Things Worked. When You Were Looking For The Big Fight, The Moment That You Thought Would Knock Everything Over, Nothing Much Happened At All.

I Was Always On Time, I Did My Work To Exact Specifications, I Spoke When Spoken To.

Sometimes Not Having Any Idea Where We’re Going Works Out Better Than We Could Possibly Have Imagined.

Some People Need A Huge Amount Of Attention, And They Are Worthy Of That Attention, And They're Still Exhausting.

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.

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.

Finding Yourself

It's Easier To Love A Woman When You Can't Understand A Word She's Saying.

If Anybody Had Shown Me The Paperwork For How My Life Was Going To Look In Five Years, I Would Have Said, "no. That Is Not Where I Want To Go."

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.

I Don't Want To Stand With Somebody's Praise. Whereas Now When People Come Up To Me, They Say, "i Love The Bookstore" And "kids! Come Here, Come Here! This Is The Woman Who Owns The Bookstore." That's Incredible. I Can Say To That, "thank You For Shopping Local. Thank You For Coming In. What Are You Reading? Let's Talk About Books." It's About Something I'm Doing As Opposed To Somehow Something I Am. I Feel Comfortable And Positive In That Role. Because It's About Reading. It's About Books. It's About Learning. It's About Business And Tax Base.

Guns Are Dangerous And Damaging Even When No One Gets Shot. They Really Do Loom.

If A Person Has Never Given Writing A Try, They Assume That A Brilliant Idea Is Hard To Come By. But Really, Even If It Takes Some Digging, Ideas Are Out There. Just Open Your Eyes And Look At The World. Writing The Ideas Down, It Turns Out, Is The Real Trick.

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.

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? In My Life I Have Met Astonishingly Good People.

That's One Of The Many Things About Having The Bookstore That I Adore. I Can Walk Into The Store And Say To Somebody, "i'm Glad You're Reading This Book" Or "i'm Glad You're Getting This Book" Or "don't Get That Book. I Read That Book And Hated That Book. Let's Get You This Book Instead."

I Used To Do Everything To Keep A Wall Up Around Myself And Keep My Life Quiet So That I Could Write.

I Could Teach. I Could Wait Tables. I Could Cook In A Restaurant. Food And Teaching Were The Two Skills I Had.

If What We Want To Do Is Promote Reading And Writing And Publishing And Making Sure This Is A Business That Keeps Going - Because It Is A Business! It's Not Just An Art - Then We Have To Take Responsibility. I Get Sort Of Crazy And Frothy When I Think About This. It Really Matters.

The Secret Is To Keep Adding Voices, Adding Ideas, And Moving Things Around As You Put Together Your Life. If You’re Lucky, Putting Together Your Life Is A Process That Will Last Through Every Single Day You’re Alive.

I Believe That, More Than Anything Else, This Grief Of Constantly Having To Face Down Our Own Inadequacies Is What Keeps People From Being Writers. Forgiveness, Therefore, Is Key. I Can't Write The Book I Want To Write, But I Can And Will Write The Book I Am Capable Of Writing. Again And Again Throughout The Course Of My Life I Will Forgive Myself.

When I Am Emperor, I Will Abolish Private Education. Private Schools, Private College. All Of These Parents With Money And Energy And The Drive For Bake Sales And A Desire To Leave Their Vast Fortunes To Education - Everybody Would Have To Be Eating Out Of The Same Educational Pot.

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

I Will Go And Speak At Rotary Clubs. I Will Go And Speak At Schools. I'm So Much In The Community, But In A Way That I Love. It's Been Such A Positive Thing.

I Decided To Make My Living As A Magazine Writer. And I Found That It Was Really Easy And Fun.

Writing Is A Miserable, Awful Business. Stay With It. It Is Better Than Anything In The World.

I Love Telling People What To Read. It's My Favorite Thing In The World, To Buy Books And Force Books On People, Take Bad Books Away From People, Give Them Better Books.

I Think People Become Consumed With Selling A Book When They Need To Be Consumed With Writing It.

Everybody Believes In Chance.

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.

In This Life We Love Who We Love. There Were Some Stories In Which Facts Were Very Nearly Irrelevant.

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 Know How It's Going To Happen, But It Is Always Going To Happen. So Stop Trying To Make Everything Permanent, It Doesn't Work. I Want You To Go Out There And Find Some Nice Man You Have No Intention Of Spending The Rest Of Your Life With. You Can Be Very, Very Happy With People You Aren't Going To Marry.

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