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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Overnight Success

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" As a memoirist, I strive for veracity. "

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

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

" 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. "