I'm always terrified when I'm writing.
Interpretation
Writing can be a daunting and fear-inducing process, reflecting the vulnerability of the writer.
Mary Karr's quote highlights the inherent fears and anxieties that often accompany the process of writing. It suggests that even accomplished writers experience moments of terror and self-doubt, emphasizing the emotional and psychological challenges involved in expressing oneself through the written word.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a writing workshop to encourage participants to embrace their fears.
There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.
Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
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.
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.
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.
Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.
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