Quotes from Lorrie Moore

It was part of being a girl in the '60s that you were creative.

Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.

Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.

One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.

I'm surrounded by music; I always was when I was growing up and continue to be. And I love music. And when I imagine a fictional world, I imagine there's music in it for those people, too.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

I think women do write politically all the time. Margaret Atwood does; Doris Lessing does.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

I grew up with 'Life' magazine on the coffee table, Life cereal on the breakfast table, and the game of Life on the card table. People were just so happy to be alive, I guess.

I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Some people get their books on the best-seller list and then they count the number of weeks, and I just never want to live that way.

You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.

Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

I'm not sure that niceness is what we should promote in writers.

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, What? Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, Wha—?

Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they can make you thin

Her life] had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hair-brush and told, There you go. She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.