Quote

I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.

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
Mysterious
Write
Writing
Things
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Ann Beattie

Image
You put a character out there and you're in their power. You're in trouble if they're in yours.
Ann Beattie
Image
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
Image
I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.
Ann Beattie
Image
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.
Ann Beattie
Image
The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.
Ann Beattie
Image
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
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
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
Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.
Ann Beattie
Image
It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.
Ann Beattie
Image
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.
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
Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
Ann Beattie
Image
People forget years and remember moments.
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
It's gratifying that it does I love to give readings.
Ann Beattie
Image
Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that.
Ann Beattie
Image
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
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
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