Ann Beattie Quotes

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“Jane remembers those years, though, as if they had been [a movie]
in part because her friends ... always talked about everything as if it was over ("Remember last night?"), while holding out the possibility that whatever happened could be rerun. Neil didn't have that sense of things. He thought people shouldn't romanticize ordinary life. "Our struggles, our little struggles," he would whisper, in bed, at night. Sometimes he or she would click on some of the flashlights and consider the ceiling, with the radiant swirls around the bright nuclei, the shadows like opened oysters glistening in brine. (In the '80s, the champagne was always waiting.)”

— Ann Beattie

“This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It's as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form becomes a word.”

— Ann Beattie

People who were dying: their minds always raced past whatever was being said, and still the pain went faster, leapfrogging ahead.

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“When we came in she had her chair sideways, without even looking up to know that it was us, that the doctors had said that sitting and staring at the snow was a waste of time; she should get involved in something. She laughed and told us it wasn't a waste of time. It would be a waste of time just to stare at snowflakes, but she was counting, and even that might be a waste of time, but she was only counting the ones that were just alike”

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

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.

— Ann Beattie

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.

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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.

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

“I've spent my life supporting myself.”

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“People forget years and remember moments.”

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie

“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 ...”

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

“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.”

— Ann Beattie