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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Mary Karr

Thought

Fun

Goodbye

" 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. "

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

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

Mary Karr

Always

Astonished

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" As a memoirist, I strive for veracity. "

Mary Karr

Veracity

Strive

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

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

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

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

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

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