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

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" Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it. "

" There are all kinds of things God wants me to do that I'm very obstreperous about. "

" 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. "

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

" Success has affected my self-definition in that I have more money. Writers pooh-pooh that idea, but it's a huge deal. "

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

" The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold. "

" The truth is when I went to graduate school I would've said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard. "

" Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it. "

" Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging. "

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

" When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me. "

" Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time. "

" 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. "

" The audiobooks I buy are never first-time reads - only rereadings of books I know well that I find intoxicating. "

" On a piece of prose, you have to work at least six hours a day. I don't know how you can do that and teach and raise a kid and paint the house. "

" 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. "

" The thing I have to do as a writer, and that God permits me to do, is that I have to be willing to fail. "

" The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker. "

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

" There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety. "

" 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. "

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

" Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others. "

" 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. "

" People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. "

" 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 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. "