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" 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. "

Mary Karr

Trying

Style

Choose

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" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary Karr

Problem

Media

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "