Ann Patchett Quotes

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

I write every day... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

When you're writing, you're putting thought into what you want to express, and then you come up with it - it comes to you. When you're improvising, it's the same thing. You're writing. You just say it out loud right then, instead of saying, 'You think this might work?'

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

I have 40 years of unpublished material, the ones they don't pick, and the reason I don't redraw them or use them again is that I like to use my brain every day and come up with new jokes.

I'm not a believer that you have to write every day. If I felt industrious, I'd spend ten hours a week writing. The writing is going on all the time in my head; the trick is to capture it. Showers are great. Traffic jams are great.

I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too.

When the ideas are coming, I don't stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn't come along all the time.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

I've had so many little ideas I've written down here and there. Some ideas I've got reams of notes for.

The hardest part of this whole movie-making endeavor is finding ideas.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

Sometimes things just fall out of your head on the paper, and if you're smart, you learn not to touch them.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

I carry a small spiral notebook with me at all times and have been doing this for many years. There's a shoe box in my closet filled with these notebooks, each riddled with notes and impressions, ideas, schemes, and soup recipes.

Everything about writing is hard for me except for that - the names pop into my head. That's one of the reasons why I always make sure I have a notebook with me.

I just start writing, and in the process, one hopefully comes up with ideas and solutions and explores all the little nooks and crannies.

What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.