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"It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that."
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Exlpore more Perception quotes
"I tell you as well as myself: what we see with our own eyes is nothing other than a cloud concealing what we should perceive with our inner sight, while what we listen to with our ears is merely a ringing sound disturbing what we should understand with our hearts. When we see a man being taken to prion by a police officer let us not hasten to assume he is a wrong-doer. When we see a corpse, and a man standing beside it with bloodstained hands, let us not conclude that this is a victim and his assassin. When we hear one man singing and another lamenting, let us ascertain which one of the two is truly happy."
"People always equate beauty with good, but it just ain't so."
"People of Berlin - people of the world - this is our moment. This is our time."
"To all apparent beauties blind, each blemish strikes an envious mind."
"I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things."
"Say, there is a book written by Tolstoy sitting right there on the table. To our unique human consciousness, the reality of the papers in the book, is infinitely different from the valuable literature that they possess. For the kind of consciousness possessed by the bug which eats those papers, literature is non-existent, yet for the Human Consciousness, literature has a greater value of truth than the papers themselves."
"It seemed natural; natural to the moment's peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk."
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
Explore more quotes by Ann Beattie
"If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant."
"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."
"Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that."
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