Quotes by Lorrie Moore

About Lorrie Moore:

Lorrie Moore is an American fiction writer known mainly for her humorous and poignant short stories.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear.

Lorrie Moore

Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could...

Lorrie Moore

Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the insane tended to give off a palpable, vibrating allur...

Lorrie Moore

I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and...

Lorrie Moore

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

Lorrie Moore

Her rage flopped awkwardly away like a duck. She felt as she had when her cold, fierce parents had at last grown sick and old, stick-boned and saggy, protected by infirmity the way cuteness protected a baby, or should, it should protect a baby, and s...

Lorrie Moore

Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said "Fuck it" and given up. It doesn't go anywhere special, it's...

Lorrie Moore

Cold men destroy women,” my mother wrote me years later. “They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun ...

Lorrie Moore

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

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

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

Lorrie Moore

To me, writing is much freer than dancing. With writing, you could do it whenever you wanted. You didn't have to do little exercises and stay in shape. You could have great moments of inspiration that advanced the story. In dance, unless you're going...

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

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

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

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 human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and fals...

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 a...

Lorrie Moore

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameLorrie Moore
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornJanuary 13, 1957
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Faculty
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship