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

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" 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. "

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

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

" My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Overnight Success

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" As a memoirist, I strive for veracity. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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