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

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

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You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house.
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An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.
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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.
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Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.
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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.
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Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.
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I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
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I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
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Most things good for writing are bad for life.
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I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.
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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.
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(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.
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All the world's a stage we're going through.
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But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.
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I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.
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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.
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If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
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An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.
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Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.
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It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.
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