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
Long
Clouds
Cursive
Really
Lessons
Blackboard
Never
Exist
Linger
Inside
Fingertips
Written
Erase
Moving
Poems
Ends
Lesson
Also
Lovely

More quotes by Ann Beattie

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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.
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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.
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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.
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People forget years and remember moments.
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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
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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
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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.
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I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's gratifying that it does I love to give readings.
Ann Beattie
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I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
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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You put a character out there and you're in their power. You're in trouble if they're in yours.
Ann Beattie
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Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that.
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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Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
Ann Beattie
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I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.
Ann Beattie