Lorrie Moore Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Creating, Records

  Interview with Angela Pneuman, www.believermag.com. October 2005.

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

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Stories, Film

  FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Jul 23, 2012

• 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.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Gossip, People

  FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Nov 11, 2011

• To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Night, Stories

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

  Lorrie Moore

  Real, Writing, Punctuation

• I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Years, Creating

  Interview with Angela Pneuman, www.believermag.com. October, 2005.

• If I had a staff of even one person, or could tolerate a small amphetamine habit, or entertain the possibility of weekly blood transfusions, or had been married to Vera Nabokov, or had a housespouse of even minimal abilities, a literary life would be easier to bring about. (In my mind I see all your male readers rolling their eyes. But your female ones - what is that? Are they nodding in agreement? Are their fists in the air?)

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Eye, Air

• 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

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Limits, Wonder

  Lorrie Moore (2010). “The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore”, p.632, Faber & Faber

• 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.

  Lorrie Moore

  Girlfriend, Writing, School

• There was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one’s feet sends one to the page and a habit is born.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Thinking, Feet

  "Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167". Interview with Elizabeth Gaffney, www.theparisreview.org. 2001.

• Most things good for writing are bad for life.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing

• Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Sometimes, Novel

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

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Character, Males

• 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.

  Lorrie Moore

  Inspiration, Writing, Exercise

  "Community life" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. June 6, 2008.

• 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.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Causes, Sometimes

  The Believer interview, www.believermag.com. October 2005.

• 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.

  Lorrie Moore

  Art, Blessed, Writing

  "See What Can Be Done by Lorrie Moore - wit without malice" by Claire Messud, www.theguardian.com. June 2, 2018.

• 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.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, People, Mind

  "'I would like to live in that year forever.'". Interview with Michael Hafford, logger.believermag.com. April 24, 2014.

• 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.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Thinking, Identity

• 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.

  Lorrie Moore

  Reading, Writing, Order

• 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!'

  Lorrie Moore

  Mother, Father, Writing

  FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Aug 27, 2012

• 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.

  Lorrie Moore

  Wise, Writing, Thinking

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