Quotes from Ann Beattie

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.

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

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.

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

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.

My friends and I make great fun of the fact that I was labeled the so-called spokesperson for the generation. I don't think many writers write from that perspective. I'm sure John Updike doesn't sit around thinking, Boy, have I got the number on suburbia. He'd be horrified if he thought that was all he was up to.

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.

It took me years and years to realize a very simple thing, which is that when you write fiction you're raising questions, and a lot of people think you're playing a little game with them and that actually you know the answers to the questions. They read your question. They don't know how to answer correctly. And they think that if they could only meet you personally and look into your eyes, you could give them the answers.

Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up.

It's logical that everyone wants to be in love. Then, for a while, life isn't taken up with the tedium of thinking everything through, talking things through. It's nice to be able to notice small objects or small moments, to point them out and to have someone eager to pretend that there's more to them than it seems.

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. In other words, if you were meeting all these people at a party you might have one frame of reference about them but once they were in a work of literature you might find, much to your surprise, that you had quite another perspective.

Clichés so often befall vain people.

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.

I do know happy marriages, including mine. But why write about something like that? I can't imagine writing, without irony, about people who are happy all the time.

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 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. In the context of a story, a fairly boring thought in a character's head can work better than a brilliant one, and a brilliantly laid-out structure can be so much worse for a story than one that is more haphazard.

I link all evils to the computer.

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'm always amazed by my friends who were reading Samuel Beckett back when I was reading Wonder Woman. I didn't think about books much in those days. I took a creative-writing course in high school, but only because it allowed me to skip gym.

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

I only have a certain bag of tricks. And that's why little things, like punctuation, make such a big difference. The dash I've always relied on hugely. I know I use it even in borderline cases, where technically it isn't correct. But it moves me through the initial draft of the text, and I let a lot of my dashes stay.

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.

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.

Clichés so often befall vain people.