Mary Karr Quotes

• Mary Karr / Poet

Im always terrified when Im writing.

• Mary Karr / Poet

I'm always terrified when I'm writing.

• Mary Karr / Poet

As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.

• Mary Karr / Poet

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.

• Mary Karr / Poet

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

• Mary Karr / Poet

For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.

• Mary Karr / Poet

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

• Mary Karr / Poet

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.

• Mary Karr / Poet

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.

• Mary Karr / Poet

I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't.

• Mary Karr / Poet

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

• Mary Karr / Poet

How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.

• Mary Karr / Poet

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

Most of the people I write about I'm still in touch with, so I would be loath to make up stuff about them.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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.

• Mary Karr / Poet

The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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

• Mary Karr / Poet

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.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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.

• Mary Karr / Poet

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.