Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.
Interpretation
Write for the passion of it, not for commercial gain.
This quote emphasizes the importance of writing as an art form and a discipline driven by passion. Ann Patchett encourages writers to focus on their love for the craft rather than on financial success, suggesting that authenticity and dedication to the art will lead to more fulfilling creative expression.
In practice
In a writer's workshop to inspire young authors.
Show kindness whenever possible. Show it to the people in front of you, the people coming up behind you, and the people with whom you are running neck and neck. It will vastly improve the quality of your own life, the lives of others, and the state of the world.
There was such an incredible logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again.
It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.
Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
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.
Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.
I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that's how people perceive me, they have to say I'm prolific. But I don't find that either complimentary or accurate.
The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.
Everyone has a creative impulse, and has the right to create, and should.
But the star thing I can live with. The music I can't live without. And that's how it lays out for me, you know. I got as big an ego and enjoy the attention.
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
The critic does his utmost to blight genius in its infancy; that which rises in spite of him he will not see; and then he complains of the decline of literature.
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