Mary Karr Quotes
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I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
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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.
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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.
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I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
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The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
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Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.
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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.
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Both my parents were agnostic. My mother was kind of a Buddhist. She had some spiritual tendencies, but they were kind of flaky - New Agey, you know? Which is partly why I'm suspicious of that sort of thing. I'm skeptical of any spiritual practice that doesn't involve other people and doesn't involve some sort of consistent tradition.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me.
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Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.
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It's completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck.
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I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.
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Most of the people I write about I'm still in touch with, so I would be loath to make up stuff about them.
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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.
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I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.
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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 don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.
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I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.
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I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
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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.
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I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.