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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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.

Ann Patchett

I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.

Ann Patchett

Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.

Ann Patchett

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.

Ann Patchett

Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.

Ann Patchett

People gave me such a bad time about wanting a baby. I didn't want a baby, and I still don't. I wanted a dog.

Ann Patchett

You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds up having a huge effect on me. If only my parents had been taking me to Kurosawa films when I was eight, but no.

Ann Patchett

Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.

Ann Patchett

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

Ann Patchett

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.

Ann Patchett

I'm very sentimental about lobsters. The last lobster I ate was the only lobster I cooked.

Ann Patchett

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.

Ann Patchett

Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.

Ann Patchett

Shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us.

Ann Patchett

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Emanuel Celler

It's not sometimes realistic to think that something magical can happen, but I think I look for the magic.

Sherilyn Fenn

It seems inevitable that the magic of the written word will fade.

Hugh Mackay

I love the magic of the studio.

Graham Coxon

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.

Tom Peters

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

Ben Okri

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

There is a real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment.

Norman Vincent Peale

Residuals from Australia, from the Mission Magic show, saved my butt. So there is a reason for everything.

Rick Springfield

Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics.

Aleister Crowley

I think that the ideal space must contain elements of magic, serenity, sorcery and mystery.

Luis Barragan

The first time I sang with David Daniels... I had never performed with a countertenor before. That first time was magic, it was so beautiful. And he's such a great artist.

Cecilia Bartoli

Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

William Jennings Bryan

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Anais Nin

Movies are like magic tricks.

Jeff Bridges

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

W. H. Murray

So many plays with magic in them that would be a terrific invitation to an imaginative animation team.

Kenneth Branagh

It's just like magic. When you live by yourself, all of your annoying habits are gone.

Merrill Markoe

Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

Peggy Noonan

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.

Raymond Chandler

I can write, He floated up to the ceiling, and a baby rabbit came out of his pocket, grew wings, and flew away. And you will believe that it really happened. That's magic, isn't it?

Humphrey Carpenter

That old black magic has me in its spell, That old black magic that you weave so well; Icy fingers up and down my spine, The same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine.

Johnny Mercer

The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.

James Cameron

I love anything to do with ventriloquism and magic.

Illeana Douglas

I spent an entire evening seated between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, being charmed from either side. It was pure Hollywood magic.

Lorna Luft

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.

Daniel Burnham

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.

Angela Carter

Ann Patchett

The magic was in the Marshall Plan itself. It provided an opportunity for appealing and constructive work. In a sense, the mission chiefs were given the opportunity to help act as architects for the new Europe that was envisioned.

Paul Hoffman

But obviously as television began, it so undercut movies that he was trying to think of a way to combine seeing these special things, and the fact that people were just captivated by the magic box.

Bob Balaban

We have relegated the saints to a pink and blue and gold world of plaster statuary that belongs to the past; it is a hangover, a relic, of the Dark Ages when men were the children of fantasy's magic.

C. Kilmer Myers

Shah is a kind of magic word with the Persian people.

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

When I used to do musical theatre, my dad refused to come backstage. He never wanted to see the props up close or the sets up close. He didn't want to see the magic.

Nia Vardalos

Dream no small dream; it lacks magic. Dream large. Then make the dream real.

Donald Wills Douglas