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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.

Ann Beattie

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Ann Beattie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: September 8
Novelist
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Short Story Writer
Writer
Washington
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More quotes by Ann Beattie

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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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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.
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I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.
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It's gratifying that it does I love to give readings.
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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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What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.
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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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I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
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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.
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Clichés so often befall vain people.
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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.
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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.
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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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the real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.
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.
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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.
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Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways.
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Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
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