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Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.

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
Writing
Assume
Assuming
Limits
Nobody
Writer
Everything

More quotes by 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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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
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I've spent my life supporting myself.
Ann Beattie
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You put a character out there and you're in their power. You're in trouble if they're in yours.
Ann Beattie
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What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.
Ann Beattie
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I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.
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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I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
Ann Beattie
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People forget years and remember moments.
Ann Beattie
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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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I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.
Ann Beattie
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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.
Ann Beattie
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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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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
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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
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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
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Clichés so often befall vain people.
Ann Beattie
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The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.
Ann Beattie
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Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.
Ann Beattie
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the real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.
Ann Beattie