Lorrie Moore Quotations

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, 'No, you lied to me. Goodbye.' When they see wickedness, they walk away.

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

To me, writing is much freer than dancing. With writing, you could do it whenever you wanted. You didnt have to do little exercises and stay in shape. You could have great moments of inspiration that advanced the story. In dance, unless youre going to choreograph things yourself, youre at the service of someone else.

If you look at most women's writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writer's description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. They're looking for certain things, because they know what women do to look a certain way.

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.

Writing has to be an obsession - it's only for those who say, 'I'm not going to do anything else.'

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

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

A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way.

If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.

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.

Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.

I want to create something that doesn't exist exactly in the real world, but exists in a kind of parallel to the real world.

I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.

I love plays. Even bad ones. I like the fact that actual live, breathing people are standing before you in tense situations that you are not personally responsible for.

When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.'

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

I'm very interested in what people will do for money. Money: it's timeless.

I've had nonstop financial problems my whole adult life. It's always been a constant balance, year to year: 'Where's the time? Where's the money?'

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

Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.

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.

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!'

My father was the child of academics and was probably destined to become an academic himself but vetoed that idea. Bailed, dropped out of graduate school and just went to work for an insurance company. But the house was full of books and music and all of that.

I'm a little harsh. When people say, 'I have writers block. What do you suggest?' I say, 'If you can't write, don't write. No one needs your writing. Don't torture yourself.'

I always feel that the book I'm working on is my last book.

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

Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply.

Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now your creative writing class calls "self-contempt giving rise to comic form." Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have.

I usually grow sick of my short-story characters and think, 'I never want to see you again.'

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.

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

I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections - collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment - but not everybody got this memo, I guess.

I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.

If I retain any freshness of approach, it's by going slowly having long intervals between finished projects.

A funny line can never exist on its own. It needs to be surrounded by mood and circumstances.

Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.

An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

Those are the love killers. They love you and then they kill you. They're from another planet. Supposedly.

It was not miserable - often I did not miss her at all. But there was sometimes a quick, sinking ache when I walked in the door and saw she was not there. Twice, however, I'd felt the same sinking feeling when she was.

I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.

Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states.

She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.

She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?

Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story. Or the story behind the story, pick your preposition. It does seem to me to be a kind of animal impulse almost, a mammalian curiosity. For a reader to wonder about the autobiography in a fiction may be completely unavoidable and in fact may speak to the success of a particular narrative, though it may also speak to its failure.

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

Most things good for writing are bad for life.

I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.

There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.

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.

I just don't want you to feel uncomfortable about this," he says. Say: "Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough." Show him your bicep.

After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.

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

It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.

The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.

I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.

My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, "Hi, do you have any kids?" and then, "Why not, don't you like kids?" "I like kids," I will explain. "I like kids very much." And when I almost run over them with my car, in my driveway, I will feel many different things.

Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.

We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.

I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.

You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex?

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.

When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. You will feel you have a kind of wisdom, very mistaken, but a mistake of some power to you and so you will sadly treasure it and grow it.

Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.

Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.

This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to know its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.

I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me.

She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust...his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at...She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.

But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.

Love is a fever," she said. "And when you come out of it you'll discover whether you've been lucky - or not.

Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.

I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can simply guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?

Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.

Plots are for dead people.

This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.

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

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.

I don't have a love life. I have a like life.

Perhaps one would be wise when young even to avoid thinking of oneself as a writer - for there's something a little stopped and satisfied, too healthy, in that. Better to think of writing, of what one does as an activity, rather than an identity - to write, I write; we write; to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun; to keep working at the thing, at all hours, in all places, so that your life does not become a pose, a pornography of wishing.

the compulsion to read and write - and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion - is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves.

Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.

shopping for clothes is like masturbation - everyone does it, but it isn't very interesting and therefore should be done alone, in an embarrassed fashion, and never be the topic of party conversation.

Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.

As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye.

Editing is just ongoing. I don't count drafts, or know what would fully constitute a draft. But I try to fix as I go. And there's always more to fix.

Awkwardness is where tension is, and tension is where the story is. It's also where the comedy is, which I'm interested in; when it resolves it tends to resolve toward melancholy, a certain resignation, which I find interesting as well.

What do I do when writing isn't going well? Well, I don't write - which is symptom, cure, and cause. And then sometimes I just tell myself, as I'm writing, "I'll fix it later." And sometimes it's true, I do.

If prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it's saying. If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn't cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.

What little reality television I've seen seems to be about economic desperation. Like the marathon dancing of the Great Depression, which should give us pause. People willing to eat flies and worms for a sum that is less than the weekly paycheck of the show's producer. I haven't seen "reality television" that is other than this kind of painful, sadistic exploitation of fit young people looking for agents.

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.

Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.