A biography for Lorrie Moorehasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.”
“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.”
“If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.”
“She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars.”
“Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.”
“Life is sad. Here is someone.”
“I usually grow sick of my short-story characters and think, 'I never want to see you again.'”
“But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.”
“Literature, of course, is not a contest.”
“So I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen.”
“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.”
“Back at home, days later, feel cranky and tired. Sit on the couch and tell him he's stupid. That you bet he doesn't know who Coriolanus is. That since you moved in you've noticed he rarely reads. He will give you a hurt, hungry-to-learn look, with his James Cagney eyes. He will try to kiss you. Turn your head. Feel suffocated. (from "How")”
“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.”
“Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.”
“Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.”
“This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just site there like a bunch of school kids with their hands raised and uncalled on--each knowing, really knowing, the answer.”
“Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn't possibly be a bad thing.”
“I'm a little harsh. When people say, 'I have writers block. What do you suggest?' I say, 'If you can't write, don't write. No one needs your writing. Don't torture yourself.'”