Lorrie Moore
Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.Collection: Humor
I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.Collection: Sad
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.'Collection: Teacher
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.
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.
You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.
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.
You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
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 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.
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!'
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.
An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.
I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny.
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.
Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.
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'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.'
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.
I think women do write politically all the time. Margaret Atwood does; Doris Lessing does.
I always feel that the book I'm working on is my last book.
It was part of being a girl in the '60s that you were creative.
I'm very interested in what people will do for money. Money: it's timeless.
I'm not sure that niceness is what we should promote in writers.
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'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?'
Writing has to be an obsession - it's only for those who say, 'I'm not going to do anything else.'
Literature, of course, is not a contest.
This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.Collection: Relationship
All the world's a stage we're going through.Collection: World
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.Collection: Love Relationship
A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.Collection: Writing
Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.Collection: Sadness
Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.Collection: Real
You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Heart
If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Numbness
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.Collection: Coffee
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Hurt
They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Fun