Quote

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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Ann Beattie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: September 8
Novelist
Professor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Would
Materials
Quite
Reason
Exploration
Might
Explore
Come
Drawn
Different
Obviously
Writing
Material
Way
Expect

More quotes by 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.
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I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
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The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.
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the real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.
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Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.
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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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You put a character out there and you're in their power. You're in trouble if they're in yours.
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Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
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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.
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Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways.
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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.
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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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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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It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.
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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.
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It's gratifying that it does I love to give readings.
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I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.
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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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What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.
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