Memoir Quotes

I think the act of lying can be separated from the genre of memoir. Though often times, people are unaware of their own subjectivity.

You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.

I could have written a misery memoir and instead I tried to make it funny. I never complained.

The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.

I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.

It's not as if I knew answers which I am going to set down in the form of a novel or a memoir or a sermon. It's, rather, I'm going to search myself for what I might have to say in this area.

If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.

If you've traveled independently through Tibet, Brandon Wilson's Yak Butter Blues will bring back memories...this lively memoir is sure to provide a yak-scented whiff of nostalgia.

Brian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a mediation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom. If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book.

I'm a layperson. I barely got out of high school. I have no business telling people what to do or my big philosophy on life. I'm certainly not going to write any sort of memoir.

When we spoke, Gene Wilder had just written a memoir called "Kiss Me Like A Stranger." The title was suggested by his late wife Gilda Radner three weeks before she died in 1989.

A memoir should have some uplifting quality, inspiring or illuminating, and that's what separates a life story that can influence other people.

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

Memoir is about handing over you life to someone and saying, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn something from it.

Famed value investor Guy Spier has managed to write what is both a gripping memoir and a fascinating study of what it takes to succeed in investing and life. A must read!

My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated.

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?

I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.

In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!

I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.

The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.

You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was so encompassing.

We mask our needs as the needs of others.

Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

Music is not my life. My life is music.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

I'd rather be single, happy, and lonely sometimes than married, lonely, and happy sometimes.

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.

Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.

For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.

It was actually fun to write [memoir], because I went back to interview people my parents had taught or who had worked with them, and I learned a lot about them that I hadn't known.

I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.

It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.

No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.

The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.

Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.

I don't read memoirs. But if you write a memoir, I would think you'd want people to know, "O.K., look, I've taken some liberties here." It's just a matter of being open with your readers.

By calling it a memoir, I meant is as a collection of memories. I thought it was (a more) artful (title) than documentary.

There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.

Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what's interesting to you isn't necessarily interesting to a reader.

Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that's the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.

I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.

I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.

This week Sarah Palin's memoir became a bestseller. It's not even out yet. It's being translated into English.

Bob Dylan wrote in his elliptical memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, he was washed up in the 1980s, no longer a commercial success, and no longer putting out good work.