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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" As a memoirist, I strive for veracity. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Overnight Success

" 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 always terrified when I'm writing. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "