Quote

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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Ann Beattie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: September 8
Novelist
Professor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
People
Communicate
Communicating
Dinner
Pillow
Understand
Chicken
Need
Explaining
Needs
Figured
Trying
Chickens
Make
Soft
Things
Drive

More quotes by 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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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.
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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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The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.
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I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.
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I've spent my life supporting myself.
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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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
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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
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Clichés so often befall vain people.
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Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.
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It's gratifying that it does I love to give readings.
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the real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.
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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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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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What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.
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.
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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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I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
Ann Beattie
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Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways.
Ann Beattie