Mary Karr Quotes
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I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.
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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.
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I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
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I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.
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I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.
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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.
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If dysfunction means that a family doesn't work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or even break down entirely. We fail each other or disappoint each other. That goes for parents, siblings, kids, marriage partners - the whole enchilada.
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There are all kinds of things God wants me to do that I'm very obstreperous about.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.
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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.
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Success has affected my self-definition in that I have more money. Writers pooh-pooh that idea, but it's a huge deal.
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I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.
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Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.
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As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
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I'm always terrified when I'm writing.
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There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
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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.
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Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.
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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.