Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Im always terrified when Im writing.
I'm always terrified when I'm writing.
As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.
For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.
Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.
He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.
I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me.
Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.
Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.
A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.
Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.
Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.
I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.
I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't.
In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.
How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.
I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.
I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.
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.
It's completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck.
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 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.
Success has affected my self-definition in that I have more money. Writers pooh-pooh that idea, but it's a huge deal.
Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.
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 shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.
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.
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.
The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
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.
When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.
Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.
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.
It turned out to be impossible for me to 'run away' in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.
Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.
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.