Quote

What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.

Ann Beattie

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ann Beattie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: September 8
Novelist
Professor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Stopped
Aim
Grace
Happen
Happens

More quotes by Ann Beattie

Image
It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.
Ann Beattie
Image
Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
Ann Beattie
Image
the real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.
Ann Beattie
Image
I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.
Ann Beattie
Image
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
Image
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
Image
People forget years and remember moments.
Ann Beattie
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.
Ann Beattie
Image
The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.
Ann Beattie
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.
Ann Beattie
Image
I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
Ann Beattie
Image
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