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

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

" 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. "

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

" I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "