Joshua Mohr Quotes

In my life the right question is simply this: What can I do to be happy today?

I used to consider myself to be a cineophile, and then I had a daughter. Ha! Now I barely see any movies.

It was important to buy into the fact that the nine hundred pages an end-reader never sees are just as valuable as the ones that are bound and placed on the shelf.

Memoirs need confusion. It's the thing every human has in common. We are magnificently confused.

I always wished to be a better planner. It seems more elegant, while my trial and error process is more akin to someone scratching an awful case of poison oak.

My job as the novelist is to present the whole case, then the reader gets to render her verdict.

I like art that trusts its audience, that's written for readers who like to work hard. I like art that knows its readers are up to the challenge of interacting with difficult material.

It's important to write like your readers are brilliant.

My musical sensibilities were formed around punk rock, that quintessential dilution of an art that's both ugly and lovely at the same time.

It's a beautiful aspect of narrative construction, hunting for the right images and metaphors to render our character's hearts/minds/souls as though they're ecosystems, full-fledged settings for a reader to inhabit like a place.

I'm a very tactile learner, so I need analog index cards, moving them all about, trying out various sequences for the book's architecture.

I'll never be the sort of author who sells that many copies. You'll never see a book of mine being sold on a table at Costco, between the extra-large jorts and a barrel of salsa. And I wouldn't have it any other way. I'll be indie till I die.

I never wanted/expected to write a memoir, but this life thing, it has a way of sideswiping our worlds, scaring us so thoroughly that our past lenses of contextualizing events don't work - they cease to matter.

If a character is honest with a reader, then (hopefully) that will engage the reader's empathy centers; she'll meet that openness with acceptance, and they'll forge a nourishing and meaningful bond as the book continues.

No matter what we've done, no matter the disappointments and sullied blunders, today is the opportunity to do right by ourselves.

Memoir is a unique opportunity to revisit yourself. I don't mean by memory. I mean in the revision process. You don't just write a chapter and that's it. You must constantly return to it. You must dote on it. And even if it's saying something ugly about who you are, you have to find the poetry in it. You have to find the poetry in yourself.

It takes a lot of time to be a good junkie or alcoholic - you spend hours getting the necessary supplies, then imbibing, then recovering, rinse and repeat. That's like eighteen hours of a day. And assuming you get out of that lifestyle before it macerates your heart, you have that Junkie Tunnel Vision, except now you get to use it for something positive: you know how to work tirelessly for one thing. Instead of using that tunnel vision to get high, I use it to make art.

The question why, at least in my life, often leads to despair. Why did this happen to me? Why didn't someone who claimed to love me treat me with respect, compassion, kindness? Etc. These questions never have answers. They are an ocean, and you'll never swim to the other side. Eventually, you'll tire and die.

Self-respect doesn't come naturally to me. I need to constantly remind myself and do the work to err on the side of self-respect, rather than self-punishment.

My father deprived me of any truths about himself. He died without ever letting me know who he truly was. I only knew his facades, basically. And it breaks my heart that he never trusted me enough to tell me the truth.

I struggle with staying clean every day, and what really keeps me from doing something stupid is my daughter.

I'm always working on something. Addiction never gets any credit, always talked about as a total liability, and I'll admit that most of its traits aren't positive in our lives. But there's one amazing thing it gave me: a tireless work ethic.

I always joke that every novel is really about the same thing: one person's struggle against society.

They say you have to get and stay sober for yourself, and of course I agree with that, but I've really appreciated the added stakes of having someone relying on me for survival. My daughter makes me want to do right. That doesn't mean I won't relapse again. It's happened to me before. But she adds a layer of love in my life that I've never known.

I always feel that as the author, once I know what a character is ashamed of, then I can go about making her truthful on the page.

I'm a semi-failed writer, but I'm a capital-F Failed musician.

I just thought it was important that people knew right from the jump that I've got problems. But in all seriousness, that's a huge part of my writing process.

Shamefulness is always a huge part of my characterizations. I like protagonists that reveal, either through "honesty" in their various thought processes or via their actions, perhaps telling us things they're not so keen on disclosing through their interactions with the outside world. Probably both during the duration of a novel.

For the book to succeed, it has to have equal parts ugliness and beauty, counterpoints adding up to emotional complexity. To me, there's a dignity in letting your art be emotionally complex.

My tunnel vision allows me to have a longer work day than most writers. I'm thankful for that.

The point of reading is to inhabit a consciousness that doesn't belong to the reader, immersing yourself in a life that's wholly realized. And a huge facet of our psychic and existential make-ups is the things we're not proud of, things we didn't ask to experience, the scenarios we flubbed.

Yes, things happened to me - brutal things - but I'm not going to give them so much clout by dwelling on them, empowering them to haunt my heart years after the events transpired. And no good comes from that. These ghosts don't need us to help them stay alive. If we're after real deal healing, these ghosts must desiccate.

Today is going to be free of the past. Today, the past can't hurt me.

We have today and hopefully tomorrow to be the best version of ourselves.

Hughes' debut novel, At Dawn, follows a former All-American wrestler, and is there any better metaphor for contemporary American life? We're all wrestling, tussling with the economy, no jobs, doing the best we can. Hughes doesn't flinch from the tough existential questions. He embraces them.