Mary Karr Quotes

I started writing stories in my spare time.

I can't imagine writing a novel without some sound. When you're facing a few hundred blank pages, silence can be cold.

I consider myself a writer. I don't favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

I cannot write a novel because I cannot work in continuity. My works are more abstract, may be, I will try short story writing.

I didn't think I could pull off a novel.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

I write short stories. I write every day.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

I would say the reason that I've never written a novel is because I've never written a novel.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

Though my stories aren't autobiographical, I do sometimes use things from my life.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.

I simply love writing good stories, that's my passion.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

I like going back and writing fiction.

I read all the time. Sometimes I get asked if I've thought about writing a novel.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

A lot of times, the inspiration for a novel is a messy bird's nest of shiny things. Little things that don't make a whole lot of sense or that, no matter how hard you look, cannot be found directly in the finished book.