Lorrie Moore

“This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.”

“They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.”

“Though she would have preferred long ago to have died, fled, gotten it all over with, the body--Jesus, how the body!--took its time. It possessed its own wishes and nostalgias. You could not...”

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”

“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.”

“But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.”

“She knew there were only small joys in life--the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through--and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.”

“Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the...”

“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.”

“I grew up with 'Life' magazine on the coffee table, Life cereal on the breakfast table, and the game of Life on the card table. People were just so happy to be alive, I guess.”

“If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize...”

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

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

“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...”

“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 r...”