Top 40 Ann Beattie Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People forget years and remember moments.”

— Ann Beattie

2. “What will happen can’t be stopped. Aim for Grace.”

— Ann Beattie

3. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

4. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

6. “I don’t even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.”

— Ann Beattie

7. “Adirondacks must sit in those uncomfortable wooden chairs with the seats tilted so deeply backward that your knees sprang up like a ventriloquist’s dummy as the wood pressed into the back of your thighs. Otherwise, why would they be so named?”

— Ann Beattie

8. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

9. “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

10. “It’s interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.”

— Ann Beattie

11. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

12. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Ann Beattie

14. “Startled starlings flew up out of the high grass, their black whorl a little tornado that did not touch down and therefore did no damage. They disappeared like a momentary perception above Yancey’s head, fanning out and flying west. Or like the clotted words crammed into a cartoon bubble.”

— Ann Beattie

15. “I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.”

— Ann Beattie

16. “You put a character out there and you’re in their power. You’re in trouble if they’re in yours.”

— Ann Beattie

17. “Might as well wear loafers without socks. Or take out a membership at the Reading Room on the path above the beach – the Reading Room, where the joke was that there wasn’t a book in the entire place.”

— Ann Beattie

18. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

21. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

22. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

23. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

24. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

26. “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

27. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

29. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

30. “I think that I’m serious, but I don’t think that I’m inordinately bleak.”

— Ann Beattie

31. “It’s gratifying that it does; I love to give readings.”

— Ann Beattie

Featured in: Reading Quotes

32. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

33. “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.”

— Ann Beattie

34. “I’ve spent my life supporting myself.”

— Ann Beattie

35. “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

36. “I wasn’t the sort of person who struck up conversations with strangers.”

— Ann Beattie

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

— Ann Beattie

38. “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

39. “When we came in she had her chair sideways, without even looking up to know that it was us, that the doctors had said that sitting and staring at the snow was a waste of time; she should get involved in something. She laughed and told us it wasn’t a waste of time. It would be a waste of time just to stare at snowflakes, but she was counting, and even that might be a waste of time, but she was only counting the ones that were just alike.”

— Ann Beattie

40. “Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that.”

— Ann Beattie

41. “I must say also that it’s never worked to my disadvantage that I have long, blond hair.”

— Ann Beattie

42. “Nothing is so lovely as a quietly snoring dog and some evening Brahms, as you sit in a comfortably overstuffed chair with your feet on the footstool.”

— Ann Beattie