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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overnight Success

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