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Ann Beattie [1947-0] American

Rank: 103
Writer, Novelist

Ann Beattie is an American novelist and short story writer. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form.

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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.		101
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.		102
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.	Home	103
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.		104
I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.		105
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.		106
It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.		107
I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.		108
I feel that these stories are being written to articulate certain confusions and disappointments, and I do mean to shake up the reader, and I do hope they're on target.		109
I've been in this business for a long time, and I no longer think that anything that I do by way of clarification is ever going to eradicate the mistakes.		110
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.		111
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.		112
Also minimalism is a term that all of us who share so little in common and who are lumped together as minimalists are not terribly happy with.		113
Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways.		114
If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that.		115
I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.		116
Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.		117
I've spent my life supporting myself.		118
Well, a few years ago I think I could have given you a more enthusiastic answer about that but in the last few years, for the first time in my life, I really haven't listened to much music. I used to work with music on and now I don't.		119
Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that.		120
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.		121
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.		122
It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.		123
It's gratifying that it does; I love to give readings.		124
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.		125
I must say also that it's never worked to my disadvantage that I have long, blond hair.		126
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.		201

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