Ann Patchett Quotes

I don't know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.

I need to be very isolated to write, and unfortunately isolation is often quite difficult to find. My ideal writing environment would be a country house hotel in the middle of nowhere, with full room service.

I'm a private person in many ways.

One constant writing ritual, no matter what I'm writing, is that I cannot write if people are around me. It wigs me out - the idea that someone is reading as I'm writing stuff.

I am not reclusive. I just have a private life.

All my houses are isolated. Many is the time I just stay home alone.

I don't beef with people, because I don't be around people. Nobody can't say nothing about me, because ain't nobody know nothing about me.

My writing time needs to surround itself with empty stretches, or at least unpeopled ones, for the writing takes place in an area of suspension as in a hanging nest that is almost entirely encapsulated.

The first few months of my life of every year are in total retreat. I don't see anybody except my husband and my dog, I don't talk to anybody, and I just write.

It's quiet for a while, and then Rowan says; "We could talk now. We're alone out here. No walls." "There are always walls." I say.

I only said, 'I want to be left alone.'

It takes isolation and solitude for me to write.

Much of the time I'm an introvert, by choice spending a lot of time on my own. I suppose liking my solitude is part of a writer's sensibility.

My life style in a sense is kind of private.

When I'm not working I try to stay out of the public eye as much as possible.

All my day is spent dealing with other people. When I come home I like it to be empty. The presence of others in my house kind of annoys me. I love coming home and shutting the doors. I feel brain dead. I'm relatively available, but not to live with.

In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street.

I like semi-torn-down places where I could get nestled in and get something done without anyone bothering me.

I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.

Because I was an only child, I don't like many people around, and that's why I don't have any servants.

I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.

There are always things I find difficult - being in crowds, remembering faces. I do like routines. I always travel with someone. My life in Avignon is a very quiet one. I have an apartment that looks over the whole city. I can drop into town, but a lot of the time I write from home. In some respects I still live a very quiet, simple life.

I keep my thoughts to myself, and I think that's one of the best ways to be.

I'm trying to take more nothing time - and that means sacrificing doing. It's partly to do with age, partly to do with the fact that writing takes up a lot of space in your head. My ideal is to go back to when I was a child. My life is quieter than it used to be. More and more I don't really want to talk to people. I'd make a good nun, actually.

I prefer to be a private person.