Ann Beattie Quotes

People forget years and remember moments.

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.

the real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.

Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.

What will happen can't be stopped. Aim for Grace.

Clichés so often befall vain people.

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.

Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.

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.

It's not about having things figured out, or about communicating with other people, trying to make them understand what you understand. It's about a chicken dinner at a drive-in. A soft pillow. Things that don't need explaining.

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.

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.

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.

I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.

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.

The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.

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.

It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.

You put a character out there and you're in their power. You're in trouble if they're in yours.

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.

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.

I've spent my life supporting myself.

Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways.

I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.

Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman.