Ann Beattie Quotes (38 Quotes)

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.

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've spent my life supporting myself.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 think I write about things that are mysterious to me.

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.

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.