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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" As a memoirist, I strive for veracity. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

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