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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

Overnight Success

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" As a memoirist, I strive for veracity. "

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

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

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

" 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 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. "