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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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Ann Beattie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: September 8
Novelist
Professor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Cynical
Extremely
Writer
Known
Often
Make
Never
Depressing

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Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.
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People forget years and remember moments.
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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.
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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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the real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.
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I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
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Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
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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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It's gratifying that it does I love to give readings.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.
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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.
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What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.
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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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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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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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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.
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