Ann Patchett Book Quotations

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

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 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.

Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.

Even though I didn't know I was applying for the job, I have somehow become the spokesperson for independent book stores.

I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.

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 craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.

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.

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.

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 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.