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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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Ann Beattie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: September 8
Novelist
Professor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Need
Explaining
Needs
Figured
Trying
Chickens
Make
Soft
Things
Drive
People
Communicate
Communicating
Dinner
Pillow
Understand
Chicken
More quotes by Ann Beattie
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
It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.
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
What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.
Ann Beattie
Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.
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
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
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
It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.
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
You put a character out there and you're in their power. You're in trouble if they're in yours.
Ann Beattie
If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that.
Ann Beattie
Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
Ann Beattie
The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.
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
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
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 must say also that it's never worked to my disadvantage that I have long, blond hair.
Ann Beattie