Quote

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

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Ann Beattie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: September 8
Novelist
Professor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Moving
Poems
Ends
Lesson
Lovely
Also
Clouds
Cursive
Long
Lessons
Blackboard
Really
Exist
Linger
Never
Inside
Fingertips
Written
Erase

More quotes by Ann Beattie

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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
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Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.
Ann Beattie
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People forget years and remember moments.
Ann Beattie
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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
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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
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If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that.
Ann Beattie
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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
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The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.
Ann Beattie
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I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
Ann Beattie
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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
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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
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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
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Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.
Ann Beattie
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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
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What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.
Ann Beattie
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It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.
Ann Beattie
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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
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It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.
Ann Beattie
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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
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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