Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Think
Calling
Thinking
Identity
Activity
Rather
Keep
Noun
Doe
Verb
Better
Nouns
Writing
Verbs

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

Image
A DARK MATTER is a page-turning thriller of every sort: psychological, sociological, epistemological . Plus, it's really scary.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.
Lorrie Moore
Image
I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, That's funny, or instead of smiling said, That's interesting, or instead of saying, You are a stupid blithering idiot, said, Well I think it's a little more complicated than that.
Lorrie Moore
Image
You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
Lorrie Moore
Image
I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.
Lorrie Moore
Image
This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!
Lorrie Moore
Image
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.
Lorrie Moore
Image
No matter what terror the earth could produce - winds, seas - a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world - no flower or stone - as a single hello from a human being.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
Plots are for dead people.
Lorrie Moore
Image
The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.
Lorrie Moore
Image
[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
Lorrie Moore
Image
You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex?
Lorrie Moore
Image
Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.
Lorrie Moore
Image
If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
Lorrie Moore