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" 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. "

Mary Karr

Self

Believe

Blessed

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

Mary Karr

Even

Myself

" Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it. "

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

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

" 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. "

Mary Karr

Anything

Week

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

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

Mary Karr

Problem

Media

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

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

" As a memoirist, I strive for veracity. "

Mary Karr

Veracity

Strive

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that's the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don't always get. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Young writers often mistakenly choose a certain vein or style based on who they want to be, unconsciously trying to blot out who they actually are. You want to escape yourself. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writing about prayer to a secular audience is tap-dancing on the radio. I want to say, 'Gee whiz, isn't this great,' and have everyone's head cocked like the RCA dog. "

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