Ann Beattie Quotations

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

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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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

I've been in this business for a long time, and I no longer think that anything that I do by way of clarification is ever going to eradicate the mistakes.

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.

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.

I feel that these stories are being written to articulate certain confusions and disappointments, and I do mean to shake up the reader, and I do hope they're on target.

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

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.

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.

Well, a few years ago I think I could have given you a more enthusiastic answer about that but in the last few years, for the first time in my life, I really haven't listened to much music. I used to work with music on and now I don't.

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

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

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

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.

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.

have been forced to close and have no idea when they may reopen.

Her prose has become known for its vivid particularity, the details of the way we live.

I think a lot of the difference between my newer work and the older work is that I would have tried to imply some of those things before.

That's what I mean; if your writing doesn't transcend the era, then it would really seem to be only of very limited sociological importance.

Well, I've found myself a lot of times with student manuscripts, saying to them that it worries me that their work seems hermetically sealed.

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

I've spent my life supporting myself.

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.

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.

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

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

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....

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.

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.

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

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.

Clichés so often befall vain people.

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.

People forget years and remember moments.

whose work has made a significant contribution to the discipline of the short story as an art form.

What does it matter what my personality is? It's fair enough to talk about the stories, but they're not an autobiographical display.

It was very much a surprise. It's very nice when someone takes notice.

That is the strange thing; I don't know if you want to call it the subconscious, but things that I don't seem to notice are getting stored away.

I like the notion that people are appreciative of the fact that my work is sometimes allusive and that there is an interrelationship of the arts.

If the waitress shows up and doesn't have an exit line, that isn't true to life - I'm hard pressed to think of a waitress who just walks away.