Quote

I always wished to be a better planner. It seems more elegant, while my trial and error process is more akin to someone scratching an awful case of poison oak.

Joshua Mohr

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Joshua Mohr
Age: 48
Born: 1976
Born: July 8
Author
Writer
Process
Elegant
Someone
Error
Planner
Seems
Poison
Scratching
Better
Trials
Planners
Always
Awful
Akin
Errors
Oaks
Case
Wished
Cases
Trial

More quotes by Joshua Mohr

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I like art that trusts its audience, that's written for readers who like to work hard. I like art that knows its readers are up to the challenge of interacting with difficult material.
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The point of reading is to inhabit a consciousness that doesn't belong to the reader, immersing yourself in a life that's wholly realized. And a huge facet of our psychic and existential make-ups is the things we're not proud of, things we didn't ask to experience, the scenarios we flubbed.
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It's a beautiful aspect of narrative construction, hunting for the right images and metaphors to render our character's hearts/minds/souls as though they're ecosystems, full-fledged settings for a reader to inhabit like a place.
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In my life the right question is simply this: What can I do to be happy today?
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I struggle with staying clean every day, and what really keeps me from doing something stupid is my daughter.
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If a character is honest with a reader, then (hopefully) that will engage the reader's empathy centers she'll meet that openness with acceptance, and they'll forge a nourishing and meaningful bond as the book continues.
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My father deprived me of any truths about himself. He died without ever letting me know who he truly was. I only knew his facades, basically. And it breaks my heart that he never trusted me enough to tell me the truth.
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Memoir is a unique opportunity to revisit yourself. I don't mean by memory. I mean in the revision process. You don't just write a chapter and that's it. You must constantly return to it. You must dote on it. And even if it's saying something ugly about who you are, you have to find the poetry in it. You have to find the poetry in yourself.
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We have today and hopefully tomorrow to be the best version of ourselves.
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Shamefulness is always a huge part of my characterizations. I like protagonists that reveal, either through honesty in their various thought processes or via their actions, perhaps telling us things they're not so keen on disclosing through their interactions with the outside world. Probably both during the duration of a novel.
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My musical sensibilities were formed around punk rock, that quintessential dilution of an art that's both ugly and lovely at the same time.
Joshua Mohr
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The question why, at least in my life, often leads to despair. Why did this happen to me? Why didn't someone who claimed to love me treat me with respect, compassion, kindness? Etc. These questions never have answers. They are an ocean, and you'll never swim to the other side. Eventually, you'll tire and die.
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No matter what we've done, no matter the disappointments and sullied blunders, today is the opportunity to do right by ourselves.
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I used to consider myself to be a cineophile, and then I had a daughter. Ha! Now I barely see any movies.
Joshua Mohr
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For the book to succeed, it has to have equal parts ugliness and beauty, counterpoints adding up to emotional complexity. To me, there's a dignity in letting your art be emotionally complex.
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It was important to buy into the fact that the nine hundred pages an end-reader never sees are just as valuable as the ones that are bound and placed on the shelf.
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I'm a semi-failed writer, but I'm a capital-F Failed musician.
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It's important to write like your readers are brilliant.
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I never wanted/expected to write a memoir, but this life thing, it has a way of sideswiping our worlds, scaring us so thoroughly that our past lenses of contextualizing events don't work - they cease to matter.
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The more we're doing to ensure we're following our joy and passion, that's when we really start to put the gas in our lives.
Joshua Mohr