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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.

Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Writing
Literary
Thing
Fiction
Love
Hear
Malicious
Like
Turns
Actuality
People
Story
Removed
True
Largely
Stories
Gossip
Great
Slightly

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
Lorrie Moore
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.
Lorrie Moore
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Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.
Lorrie Moore
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If prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it's saying. If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn't cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.
Lorrie Moore
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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
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We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.
Lorrie Moore
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But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.
Lorrie Moore
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Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce
Lorrie Moore
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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
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When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with.
Lorrie Moore
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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
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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
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Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.
Lorrie Moore
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.
Lorrie Moore
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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
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All the world's a stage we're going through.
Lorrie Moore
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I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!
Lorrie Moore