Mary Karr Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“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.”

“Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”