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It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.

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
Life
Unobservant
Relatively
Daily
Though
Interesting
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Ann Beattie

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Clichés so often befall vain people.
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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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The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.
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People forget years and remember moments.
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I must say also that it's never worked to my disadvantage that I have long, blond hair.
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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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Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.
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Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.
Ann Beattie
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Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.
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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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