Top 161 Quotes & Sayings by Lorrie Moore

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.'

You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

To me, writing is much freer than dancing. With writing, you could do it whenever you wanted. You didn't have to do little exercises and stay in shape. You could have great moments of inspiration that advanced the story. In dance, unless you're going to choreograph things yourself, you're at the service of someone else.

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.

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.

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

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.'

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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!'

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?'

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.

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

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

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.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

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

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

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

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

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.

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

Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it less lonely.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

But I believed in starting over. There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of miracles. If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind.

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!'

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.

Love drains you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce

Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!

You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had. Warren Lasher Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano Charles Deats or Keats Alfonse Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list.

Her life her life had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hair-brush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane.

No matter what terror the earth could produce - winds, seas - a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world - no flower or stone - as a single hello from a human being.

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.

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.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and-let’s be frank—fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels. There might be great illicit loves, enduring joy, faith-shaking accidents with farm machinery. But you have to not know in order to see what stories your life’s efforts bring you. The mystery is all.

People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip.