Lorrie Moore Quotes

Author Image

Lorrie Moore

Profession : Writer

Birth : January 13, 1957

I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.

Lorrie Moore

When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.'

Lorrie Moore

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

Lorrie Moore

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

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

I love plays. Even bad ones. I like the fact that actual live, breathing people are standing before you in tense situations that you are not personally responsible for.

Lorrie Moore

I'm not sure that niceness is what we should promote in writers.

Lorrie Moore

You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.

Lorrie Moore

A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way.

Lorrie Moore

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

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.

Lorrie Moore

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

Lorrie Moore

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

Lorrie Moore

I want to create something that doesn't exist exactly in the real world, but exists in a kind of parallel to the real world.

Lorrie Moore

If you look at most women's writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writer's description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. They're looking for certain things, because they know what women do to look a certain way.

Lorrie Moore

Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.

Lorrie Moore

I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny.

Lorrie Moore

You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.

Lorrie Moore

My father was the child of academics and was probably destined to become an academic himself but vetoed that idea. Bailed, dropped out of graduate school and just went to work for an insurance company. But the house was full of books and music and all of that.

Lorrie Moore

I'm surrounded by music; I always was when I was growing up and continue to be. And I love music. And when I imagine a fictional world, I imagine there's music in it for those people, too.

Lorrie Moore