American author (1947- )
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.
ANN BEATTIE
Conversations with Ann Beattie
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
Walks With Men
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.
ANN BEATTIE
Conversations with Ann Beattie
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
Walks With Men
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
Conversations with Ann Beattie
People who were dying: their minds always raced past whatever was being said, and still the pain went faster, leapfrogging ahead.
ANN BEATTIE
"Second Question", The New Yorker Stories
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
Conversations with Ann Beattie
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.
ANN BEATTIE
The Paris Review, spring 2011
Clichés so often befall vain people.
ANN BEATTIE
Walks With Men
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.
ANN BEATTIE
Where You'll Find Me and Other Stories
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.
ANN BEATTIE
The New Yorker Stories
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
Walks with Men
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.
ANN BEATTIE
The Paris Review, spring 2011
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.
ANN BEATTIE
"Moving Water", The New Yorker Stories
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.
ANN BEATTIE
The New Yorker Stories
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.
ANN BEATTIE
The New Yorker Stories
I link all evils to the computer.
ANN BEATTIE
The Paris Review, spring 2011
The real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.
ANN BEATTIE
Falling in Place
My students make fun of me for saying, I've read this carefully now, and you've written it carefully--too carefully. The phone never rings, people get to talk for four pages without interruption. We're used to daily life being the fire truck coming by with its deafening siren. To put that siren in fiction--and not at the convenient moment, but maybe a minute before the convenient moment, or way after the convenient moment--is a kind of acknowledgment to the reader that you're aware there's another life out there that's out of control. As a writer, it's an advantage to work within open-ended, messy moments.
ANN BEATTIE
The New Yorker Stories
Irony always exerted a persuasive pull. I felt better when it was present, like stacked duvets, even if it was necessary to turn some back for a while.
ANN BEATTIE
Walks with Men