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A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.

Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Story
Lovely
Rather
Daily
Jobs
Period
Stories
Periods
Years
Exciting
Visitor
Like
Labor
Visitors
Spend
Weekend
Novel
Mad

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.
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Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
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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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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
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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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They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
Lorrie Moore
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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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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
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Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.
Lorrie Moore
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An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.
Lorrie Moore
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[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
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.
Lorrie Moore
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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.
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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