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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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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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I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.
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Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
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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.
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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'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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Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that.
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I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
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I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.
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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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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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Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.
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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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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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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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The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.
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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I've spent my life supporting myself.
Ann Beattie
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What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.
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