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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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Ann Beattie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: September 8
Novelist
Professor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Inordinately
Bleak
Serious
Think
Thinking

More quotes by 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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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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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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I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.
Ann Beattie
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I've spent my life supporting myself.
Ann Beattie
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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.
Ann Beattie
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I must say also that it's never worked to my disadvantage that I have long, blond hair.
Ann Beattie
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I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
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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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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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
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What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.
Ann Beattie
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Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
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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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.
Ann Beattie
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Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.
Ann Beattie
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If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that.
Ann Beattie
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Clichés so often befall vain people.
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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People forget years and remember moments.
Ann Beattie