Mary Karr Quotes

The idea of a memoir is to tell the truth. I know that often the truth hurts, but a lie hurts even more.

Really, as a writer, I believe that if you're going to write about your own life, you need to do it as honestly and candidly as you are capable.

I love being uncomfortable. I love feeling very revealed. And when I watch a piece of work that I've done, I'm actually looking for that. How naked is this character? How truthful is this character? If it's truthful, there's automatically a separation.

'M Train' is as close to knowing what I'm like as anything. I don't know exactly what the book is about. All and nothing, I suppose.

Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes.

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

What I've found - and the older I get, the more I understand this and stand behind it - is, my whole life has been an exploration of telling the truth. It's scary to be truthful, and it's scary to reveal yourself, and I'm very attracted to doing things that scare me.

If you're going to write about your life, you must write about your life.

The problem is that even as you reveal the mysteries in your past, you are accumulating them in the present; complete honesty is the stuff of post-mortem, not autobiography.

If you bill something as a memoir, you're implying that everything in it is true.

Bleachers comes from a different place. It's personal. It's just me putting myself out there as myself. It's very intense.

I mean, my stand-up is very honest and exposing in this way. I probably carry that into everything I do.

An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books.

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.

Definitely, there is a sense in my writing that people now know me in a personal way. And to an extent, that's true because I write about very personal things, and I use the personal often to contextualize some of these sociopolitical issues that we're dealing with. And to an extent, they're right. They know something about me.

An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy.

Truth never was indebted to a lie.

The best stories come out of the truth.

I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced myself.

Truth is so much more interesting than the fiction we're used to.

I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you.