Top 30 Mary Karr Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It’s morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it’s emotionally and spiritually empowering.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.

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

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.

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That’s when the sparkle started 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.

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.

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.

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

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