Explore Quotes by Mary Karr

I have a completely addictive personality. Diet Coke is my last - God, I know people counting days off Diet Coke; I'm such a Diet Cokehead. Now I won't let myself buy it.

I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.

Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.

Young writers often mistakenly choose a certain vein or style based on who they want to be, unconsciously trying to blot out who they actually are. You want to escape yourself.

I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on.

Most of the people I write about I'm still in touch with, so I would be loath to make up stuff about them.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

If dysfunction means that a family doesn't work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or even break down entirely. We fail each other or disappoint each other. That goes for parents, siblings, kids, marriage partners - the whole enchilada.

My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.

I'm always terrified when I'm writing.

I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.

I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.

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

It's completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck.

When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that's the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don't always get.

There are all kinds of things God wants me to do that I'm very obstreperous about.

Success has affected my self-definition in that I have more money. Writers pooh-pooh that idea, but it's a huge deal.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.

Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That’s a more fruitful way to be.