Quotes from Dinty W. Moore

My advice to writers: thank goodness we can revise and adjust and tighten and rethink before going public with our words. Revision is our friend. Our best friend. I love revision.

Not all writing is political or revolutionary, but the very act of giving yourself permission to write, to speak, to share the truth no matter whether the truth you understand is the truth others want to acknowledge, is brave, powerful, and important.

Exercise the muscles that compassionately open the heart. In your writing and your life.

Words will never fully capture what is alive in our hearts. It would be a shame, though, if we denied our bears their dancing.

We are rushing, always thinking of the future, of our destination, focusing on what is four hours, or four hundred miles, or four years ahead, and constantly missing what is right there, just then, at the moment.

A lesson is learned. It is easier, more efficient, to chop onions when you are only chopping onions, not conversing, checking up on the rest of the kitchen, answering the phone, flirting with the young lady scouring the coffeepot, or whatever.

Cars, with their air conditioning, windows, sound systems, and great speed, keep us isolated from our environment... Self-propulsion, such as biking, walking, canoeing, puts us in touch with the land below and the world around us.

But if we don't prefer things, then we increase our chances to be content.

The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. —THOMAS PAINE

Memory is like a rope, knotted every three or four feet, and hanging down a deep well. When you pull it up, just about anything might be attached to those knots. But you'll never know what's there if you don't pull. And the more you pull at that rope, the more you find.

The writer of a personal essay does not begin with an idea and then struggle to prove her point; she investigates, keeps an open mind, goes wherever the thought may lead, and, in fact, may end the essay having still not reached a final conclusion.

The difference between a story and an essay is that the storyteller just wants to entertain the reader, while the essayist has been to graduate school.

Those are serious questions. Let me avoid them as best I can.

What are minnows but brief flashes? And what are thoughts? And how do you capture a brief flash, even for a second?

Your memory rope may not contain a precise, photographic accounting of past events, because those moments become lost within seconds of anything that occurs. But still, your honest (if not accurate) memories will be attached to those knots, and those honest memories—along with reflection, examination, reconsideration—are precisely what the memoirist has to offer.

Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused.…Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen." —George Saunders

My job is not to just set down events that happened to me. My job is to create an experience for a reader." —Mary Karr

The writer of nonfiction might be starting with events that really happened, but recreating them is an imaginative feat. Ordering them is an imaginative feat. Making sense of them is an imaginative feat." —Robin Hemley

Mister Sensei Essay Writer Guy opens his eyes momentarily, smiles, and says, "When you are not writing, be thoroughly not writing; when you are writing, be writing through and through.

The high school I attended was named the Cathedral Preparatory School for Young Catholic Boys. It was a prep school, preparing us for one of two futures: either playing football or spending our lives getting sucker-punched by those who did play football.

Michel de Montaigne, a highly-educated French nobleman who retired from public duties and retreated to his family's castle around 1570 to focus on his writing, is

When we are chopping onions, we should be chopping onions only, right there, right then, at the chopping board, as if the onions, the knife, and our hands were all that existed.