Mary Karr Quotes
Collection of top 97 famous quotes about Mary Karr
Mary Karr Quotes & Sayings
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I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
— 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
Nothing matters but the quality of the affection - in the end - that has carved the trace in the mind dove
— Mary Karr
How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.
— Mary Karr
No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre.
— Mary Karr
Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and they think they hit a home run.
— Mary Karr
I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
— Mary Karr
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
— 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 don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.
— Mary Karr
Sentimentality is only emotion you haven't proven to the reader - emotion without vivid evidence.
— Mary Karr
The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.
— 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
Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore
— Mary Karr
In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech the only prayers said. — Mary Karr
A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
— Mary Karr
Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It's not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.
— Mary Karr
What would you write if you weren't afraid?
— Mary Karr
Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.
— Mary Karr
I'm always terrified when I'm writing.
— 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
Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.
— Mary Karr
(Later, I'l learn that's the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.)
— Mary Karr
Was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I'd
— Mary Karr
I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.
— Mary Karr
Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't.
— 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
Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn't enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry,
— Mary Karr
But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go.
— Mary Karr
It's hard to be an articulate ghost.
— Mary Karr
Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to rever any pinpoint of light now.
— Mary Karr
Whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:
— Mary Karr
Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you're shaping the past's meaning.
— Mary Karr
Our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit
— Mary Karr
The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.
— Mary Karr
They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According
— Mary Karr
(Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?)
— Mary Karr
In those days, I still enjoyed a child's desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe.
— Mary Karr
As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
— Mary Karr