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" 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. "

Mary Karr

Feel

Political

Art

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Mary Karr

Anything

Week

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

" 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. "

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

" Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it. "

" 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. "

Mary Karr

Problem

Media

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

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

" I always thought my family was so bizarre, so when people started coming up to me and saying, 'My family was exactly like yours,' I was completely knocked out. "

Mary Karr

Family

Thought

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Mary Karr

Always

Astonished

" 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. "

Mary Karr

Attention

Looking

" 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. "

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

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

Mary Karr

Even

Myself

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