MARY KARR

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me.

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

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

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that's the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don't always get.

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

Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.

There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

If dysfunction means that a family doesn't work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or even break down entirely. We fail each other or disappoint each other. That goes for parents, siblings, kids, marriage partners - the whole enchilada.

I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it.

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.

I have a completely addictive personality. Diet Coke is my last - God, I know people counting days off Diet Coke; I'm such a Diet Cokehead. Now I won't let myself buy it.

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

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.

People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark.

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

I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.

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.

Both my parents were agnostic. My mother was kind of a Buddhist. She had some spiritual tendencies, but they were kind of flaky - New Agey, you know? Which is partly why I'm suspicious of that sort of thing. I'm skeptical of any spiritual practice that doesn't involve other people and doesn't involve some sort of consistent tradition.

There are all kinds of things God wants me to do that I'm very obstreperous about.

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

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.

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.

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