War & Peace Quote by Ann Beattie

New York shows up here as a full-contact sport: even inside your own apartment, you’re playing defense. Beattie’s sentence stacks small barricades - safety locks, then music - and that “not only... but” rhythm mimics the escalation of urban self-protection. The locks are literal, the music is psychological, a privately curated soundproofing that turns the city into background noise you can control. She’s not romanticizing the metropolis as muse; she’s describing it as intrusion.

The telling phrase is “keeping the city at a distance.” Distance isn’t just about crime or neighbors or sirens; it’s about attention. The city’s real threat is its constant demand that you register it. Beattie’s work often lives in the domestic and the moment-to-moment, where emotional meaning arrives sideways. This quote quietly argues that creativity depends on selective deafness, on building a moat around your own mind.

Then she undercuts any grand manifesto with “and so forth,” that wry, almost embarrassed shrug at the end. It’s a classic writer’s move: refusing to sanctify the struggle, refusing to turn “creative time and peace” into a lifestyle slogan. The subtext is that the need is ordinary, even faintly absurd - and still nonnegotiable. In the context of late-20th-century American writing, it’s a corrective to the myth of the city as nonstop stimulus: sometimes art requires subtraction, not stimulation, and sometimes the most radical act in New York is choosing what you won’t let in.