Quotes from Mary Karr

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

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

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.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

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

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

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

Bad things are gonna' happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying won't stave the really bad things off. Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people's blow-dried outsides. Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.

I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they'll try -- without let up -- to break you.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it's done right.

And Meredith says that reminds her of a Camus novel, the one about the plague, and she tells the story of it, the tale holding you in thrall, and she ends her version with a line you'll write down in your notebook, the place where the atheist doctor hollers at a priest: All your certainties aren't worth one strand of a woman's hair.

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him, and so loses respect for himself. And having no respect, he ceases to love. Fyodor Dostoevsky

We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.

The changes are coming fast and blind now, and in your skull sits an hourglass with a grain size hole through which numb seconds are sliding.

None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one.

every writer needs two selves—the generative self and the editor self.

Faith is not a feeling, she says. It's a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope.

One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit.

I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.

Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.

He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.

At some point the talk got heated, and Paolo called Mother a strumpet, for which Daddy was said to have stomped a serious mudhole in Paolo's ass.

it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.