Poet

The audiobooks I buy are never first-time reads - only rereadings of books I know well that I find intoxicating.

When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that's the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don't always get.

I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.

I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.

On a piece of prose, you have to work at least six hours a day. I don't know how you can do that and teach and raise a kid and paint the house.

I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it.

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.

I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.

I'm always terrified when I'm writing.

I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, and I'm just an arrogant little thing. It's hard for me to admit that I can't understand something, let alone not be in charge of it.

As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.

There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.

For days on end, I avoid the Web, never logging in until about two or three, after I've written all morning. On a good week, I don't go online till after Wednesday, so four or five days might lapse without my checking e-mail.

I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

The truth is when I went to graduate school I would've said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard.

I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me.