Quote

Most things good for writing are bad for life.

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
Life
Writing
Good
Things

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

Image
I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.
Lorrie Moore
Image
Love drains you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering the clocks stop and go and stop.
Lorrie Moore
Image
Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.
Lorrie Moore
Image
Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply.
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
Her life her life had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hair-brush and told, There you go. She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.
Lorrie Moore
Image
When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.
Lorrie Moore
Image
Plots are for dead people.
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
(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
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
Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.
Lorrie Moore
Image
Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.
Lorrie Moore
Image
Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
Lorrie Moore
Image
One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.
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
Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
Lorrie Moore
Image
I just don't want you to feel uncomfortable about this, he says. Say: Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough. Show him your bicep.
Lorrie Moore
Image
I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections - collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment - but not everybody got this memo, I guess.
Lorrie Moore