Ann Beattie Quotes

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

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

- Ann Beattie

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

- 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

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

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

- 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

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

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

- Ann Beattie

I've spent my life supporting myself.

- 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

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

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

- Ann Beattie

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

- 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

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

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

- Ann Beattie

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

- 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

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 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'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

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

- 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

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

- 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