Ann Patchett Quotes

My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!

It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.

Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

When I read, I don't need a character to look like me, act like me, or think like me. I don't need to have my heart broken. I don't need to be surprised or amused or challenged, and I don't need to swoon.

Point of view gets me. If I can feel like a character rather than a reader, I'll read that book.

The reason I never want a book to end is that I start to feel like the characters are my friends. I'll miss them when they're gone.

A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness, and return to it years after, it is changed surely, with the change in yourself.

You want to see the people you've sort of come to know and love, or love to hate, you want to see them develop in some way. And I hope people get sort of caught up in that arc.

I write the books that I'm compelled to and I definitely learn things about the world when I write them, and I hope that other people get something out of them, enjoy them, see the world differently when they're done.

When I sign books, I get lines of people and what they usually say is: "Thank you. You have changed my life." I am really moved by that.

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

When I read scripts and when I read books, it's more of an emotional response and I was really drawn to these characters.

Some books you read. Some books you enjoy. But some books just swallow you up, heart and soul.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

Imagine! It is the real power of a book--not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

Horror movies often work better when we have a stake in the game. The more we care about the characters, the more human they are to us, the more appealing they are to us and the more effective the horror tends to be.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.

Generally my favorite remarks always come from my readers. I've had people say my books made them laugh, or cry, or that it frightened them late at night.

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

I love the apparent quiet of reading a book. You sit there; you're not really moving. It looks very solitary. It looks very boring, but actually it's the most exciting place because it's going on for you, and you're in that relationship. In that sense, it's like being with a lover. Nobody else can intrude on that space. It's the two of you. It's your own world.

I want to engage the reader. I'm an emotional writer, in the sense that I would be happy if you re-read a book for the intellectual or the mental part of it, but, the first time, I just like to reach out and grab you, pull you in.

I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that.

I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.