Ann Beattie Quotes

People forget years and remember moments.

When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days.

Because I don’t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock.

Clichés so often befall vain people.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect.

Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman.

I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.

It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.

I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.

Also minimalism is a term that all of us who share so little in common and who are lumped together as minimalists are not terribly happy with.

When I lived in New York, not only did I have safety locks on the door but I had the music going, keeping the city at a distance, trying to find creative time and peace and so forth.

I must say also that it's never worked to my disadvantage that I have long, blond hair.

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order.

Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.

You have to figure out who the right person is to tell the story. And often, people who are very self-aware will only sound as if they are pontificating if they tell the story.

I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.

Much of what happens in Love Always is really from overheard conversations in the Russian Tea Room. It's an improvisation of the way certain Hollywood agents think and talk to each other.

Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.

The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.

Italics provide a wonderful advantage: you see, right away, that the words are in a rush. When something exists at a slant, you can't help but consider irony.

What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.

Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.

It's not about having things figured out, or about communicating with other people, trying to make them understand what you understand. It's about a chicken dinner at a drive-in. A soft pillow. Things that don't need explaining.

the real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.

While I would agree that I write about serious subjects, and that they're not necessarily the most pleasant subjects or even the most pleasant people, as a writer I just think about the humorous aspects of these things - that's what keeps me going when I'm writing a story.

You put a character out there and you're in their power. You're in trouble if they're in yours.

I am not alone in bearing grudges against reviewers who have doomed a book's chances because they've missed the point, the tone, everything.

Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways.

It's gratifying that it does; I love to give readings.

Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that.

It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.

If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that.

I've spent my life supporting myself.

I could name a few songs and say exactly what summer they came out and what boy I thought I was in love with when I was fourteen years old, but I think that music used to be really more a part of the culture when people went out dancing in a different way than they do now.