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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
Inside
Fingertips
Written
Erase
Moving
Poems
Ends
Lesson
Also
Lovely
Long
Clouds
Cursive
Really
Lessons
Blackboard
Never
Exist
Linger
More quotes by 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
Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
Ann Beattie
Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways.
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
It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.
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
Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.
Ann Beattie
I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.
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
The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.
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
I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
Ann Beattie
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
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
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
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
You put a character out there and you're in their power. You're in trouble if they're in yours.
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
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
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