Top 49 Quotes by Mary Karr

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.

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

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

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

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

I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.

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

I'm always terrified when I'm writing.

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.

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