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I've spent my life supporting myself.

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
Spent
Life
Supporting

More quotes by 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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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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I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.
Ann Beattie
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People forget years and remember moments.
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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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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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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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.
Ann Beattie
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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
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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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Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
Ann Beattie
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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.
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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Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.
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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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
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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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Clichés so often befall vain people.
Ann Beattie
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Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.
Ann Beattie