Ali Liebegott Quotes

I'm always wondering what is the job that gives the writer the most amount of time to write. I still don't know what the answer is as someone who has taught and is now working at a grocery store.

I'm a writer who stacks cat food for a living. It's true: I have a master's degree in creative writing, I've published two critically successful books, and I get paid to replenish the shelves of my local food co-op with pet food, sponges and toilet paper. Nine days out of 10, I do it quite happily.

Since becoming an alleged adult, I've always felt like I should exercise - or should at least want to exercise - and make a feeble attempt at health, thus staving off terrible things like the coronary heart disease and high cholesterol described to me in 1980s margarine commercials.

Who isn't interesting enough to help --
what forgotten woman sits in a lawn chair in her yard
with a can of soda pressed to her thigh, and the radio
blaring the death toll of Texans,
who were victims of a record heat wave?
Whose inner voice sits quiet like an obedient dog
and never says, go go go.

I want to go places I've never been
Because I haven't failed there yet.

So you can understand a little better,
How a disgruntled waitress might pack her dog
And a few belongings and head for a town
She dreamed of, searching for something to break
The spell of monotonous, morbid night speak.

As a poet and writer in general I feel very grateful that I can just make a chapbook and that we don't have the expenses of filmmakers.

Sometimes I forget when I read a book that it didn't exist in English first.

When I see a room full of people pedaling away on stationary bikes, I fall into an existential spiral. It's confirmation that all we do as humans is pedal, pedal, pedal, and go nowhere. We're just specks of dust in the universe, riding 1970s stationary bicycles.

I was the first in my family to go to college, and I waitressed all the way through, using my earnings to pay for a bachelor's degree first and then a master's. I resented classmates who didn't have to work real jobs, the ones who had the luxury of taking unpaid internships that would eventually position them for high-paying careers.

I'd gotten the message in my home, starting with my grandfather, that real work, the kind that makes you sweat and gets your hands dirty, is a respectable, necessary thing. But I wanted to write - and writing didn't qualify. Whenever I told my parents I dreamed of becoming a writer, they said, 'Great, but what are you going to do for work?'

I feel very discouraged with the state of gay and lesbian publishing because I don't feel like we're really welcome in the mainstream and then you get ghettoized and put on some lesbian book club reading list where you don't want to be either.

In Courtney Moreno's In Case of Emergency the working class save the world and themselves. A wonderful first book!

Lots of people hate gay people. You can tell who they are because they start sentences with, "It's not like I hate gay people."