Top 27 Quotes by Ann Beattie

Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.

If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.

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.