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.

- Mary Karr

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.

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

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.

- Mary Karr

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

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

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.

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.

- Mary Karr

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.

- Mary Karr

The truth is when I went to graduate school I would've said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard.

- Mary Karr

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.

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

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.

- Mary Karr

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.

- Mary Karr

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.

- Mary Karr

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

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.

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

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

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

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

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.

- Mary Karr

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.

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

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.

- Mary Karr

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

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

- Mary Karr

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.

- Mary Karr

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

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.

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

- Mary Karr

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.

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

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

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

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.

- Mary Karr

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

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

- Mary Karr

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

- Mary Karr

I'm always terrified when I'm writing.

- Mary Karr