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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I've spent my life supporting myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Nothing is so lovely as a quietly snoring dog and some evening Brahms, as you sit in a comfortably overstuffed chair with your feet on the footstool.