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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" As a memoirist, I strive for veracity. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it. "

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

Overnight Success

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "