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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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Ann Beattie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: September 8
Novelist
Professor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Chances
Tone
Alone
Grudges
Chance
Reviewers
Point
Grudge
Everything
Bearing
Book
Missed
Doomed

More quotes by Ann Beattie

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Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.
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I've spent my life supporting myself.
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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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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.
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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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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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Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
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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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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.
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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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The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.
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What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.
Ann Beattie
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It's gratifying that it does I love to give readings.
Ann Beattie
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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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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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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 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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It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.
Ann Beattie
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Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.
Ann Beattie
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I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.
Ann Beattie