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All Quotes by author - Mary Karr

" Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me. "

" As a memoirist, I strive for veracity. "

" Both my parents were agnostic. My mother was kind of a Buddhist. She had some spiritual tendencies, but they were kind of flaky - New Agey, you know? Which is partly why I'm suspicious of that sort of thing. I'm skeptical of any spiritual practice that doesn't involve other people and doesn't involve some sort of consistent tradition. "

" Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down. "

" Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it. "

" For days on end, I avoid the Web, never logging in until about two or three, after I've written all morning. On a good week, I don't go online till after Wednesday, so four or five days might lapse without my checking e-mail. "

" Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't. "

" I always thought my family was so bizarre, so when people started coming up to me and saying, 'My family was exactly like yours,' I was completely knocked out. "

" I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed. "

" I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on. "

" I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look. "

" I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny. "

" If dysfunction means that a family doesn't work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or even break down entirely. We fail each other or disappoint each other. That goes for parents, siblings, kids, marriage partners - the whole enchilada. "

" I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer. "

" I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer. "

" I have a completely addictive personality. Diet Coke is my last - God, I know people counting days off Diet Coke; I'm such a Diet Cokehead. Now I won't let myself buy it. "

" I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me. "

" I'm always terrified when I'm writing. "

" I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient! "

" I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen. "

" I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities. "

" I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state. When I've been that way, I've always been less exalted than I would have liked. "

" I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive. "

" I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves. "

" It's completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck. "

" I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it. "

" I've never contended that I had a really horrible life. "

" I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years. "

Overnight Success

" I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, and I'm just an arrogant little thing. It's hard for me to admit that I can't understand something, let alone not be in charge of it. "

" Most of the people I write about I'm still in touch with, so I would be loath to make up stuff about them. "

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