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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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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Precisely
However
Write
Many
Writing
Mind
People

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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.
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I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.
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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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They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
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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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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
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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!
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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.
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Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, 'No, you lied to me. Goodbye.' When they see wickedness, they walk away.
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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.
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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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I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
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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?
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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.
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When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. You will feel you have a kind of wisdom, very mistaken, but a mistake of some power to you and so you will sadly treasure it and grow it.
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One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.
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Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.
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!'
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Plots are for dead people.
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Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
Lorrie Moore