Love Quote by Ann Beattie

Gratitude is doing double duty here: it reads as polite modesty, but it also slips in a quiet claim of legitimacy. “It’s gratifying that it does” is Ann Beattie letting the applause stay in the room without dragging it into a speech about ego. The pronoun “it” is a little curtain—she doesn’t name what “does” (sell? resonate? draw crowds?), which keeps the sentence airy and socially safe. That vagueness is a writerly move: control the frame, keep the attention on the practice rather than the market.

Then she pivots: “I love to give readings.” Not “I don’t mind” or “I’m honored,” but love—an unusually direct emotional verb for an author associated with cool precision and social observation. The intent feels twofold. First, she’s affirming that literature isn’t only solitary labor; it has a public life, a performance element, an afterlife in other people’s bodies and voices. Second, she’s reclaiming a part of the job that many writers publicly dread: the touring, the explaining, the being-a-person part.

The subtext is that the reading is one of the few moments where a writer gets immediate feedback. Fiction is normally delayed gratification by design; you send sentences into the world and wait months or years for proof they landed. A reading collapses that distance. In the contemporary literary economy, where visibility and connection matter, Beattie’s line also gently admits what’s often treated as uncool to say out loud: attention can be satisfying, and that satisfaction doesn’t automatically cheapen the work.