Memoir Quotes

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.

I'm not into this memoir craze that's been going on for 20 years now and doesn't seem to ever let up. People just indiscriminately say "memoir" now when it's a person writing about their own life.

I'm not one of those people who's so blinded by my own work and my sweat. It's kind of risky writing a memoir when you're really part of a larger universe.

She had all the best things wrong with her—incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She’s so lucky.

I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

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

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.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

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.

I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.

I actually find it pretty tedious when magazines ask me to write articles based on my real life, because I've already lived it and there's nothing new to discover. So, I'm unlikely to write a memoir.

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Goldie Hawn wrote her memoirs, no one said Goldie Hawn was snitching. When Jane Fonda wrote her memoirs, no one said Jane Fonda was snitching.

I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring.

Now that Mr. Carter has made a book of his diary, an adoring memoir entitled Keeping Faith, the notes read like a collection of letters sent from scout camp.

I think that the celebrity memoir as a genre is looked upon as a lesser form. One of my missions as a ghostwriter has been to elevate that form. Maybe that sounds pretentious!

Cheryl Strayed reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir Wild, of what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe, physical and psychic hardship, and loss.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).

The memoirs I love are all very intense. If you're going to do a memoir and protect yourself, what the hell's the point? Just do fiction.

Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.

Working with somebody who has a more interesting life than I do - and getting to take on that life temporarily - is an endlessly interesting way to have the experience of writing memoir.

Book Everything is Flammable is an odd format though, not quite a diary and not quite a memoir. I was working on it as it was happening. This was gratifying to me.

Writing a memoir isn't particularly interesting to me. I'm not like Ellen [DeGeneres], where I can write, 'Water bottles--they're crazy!' and it's funny.

I can’t help thinking about memoir as a down-and-up process: Dive down for color; come up for context. Sink back down for action; climb back up for self-awareness and gratitude.

You read so much about the healing power of memoir, but you don't read about the wounding power it has first. The recollection of past events is not, in and of itself, therapeutic.

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

My memoir is about my time in film and the decision to leave Hollywood, grow up, and stop pretending.

I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.

I'm making a kind of a memoir of certain aspects and times in my life. Now that I'm older I can look back and analyze some things, and see the root of things.

Isn't this amazing? Clinton is getting $8M for his memoir, Hillary got $8M for her memoir. That is $16M for two people who for eight years couldn't remember anything.

The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

One of the most challenging aspects of writing a memoir is finding your own voice, and you should be very careful about being influenced by someone else's voice.

I like to think about the genre, the essay or the memoir, as much as I enjoy writing within its fluid parameters. And teaching allows me to think about it, to articulate it, and to explore it.

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.

The Stovepipe is a memoir full of laughter and tears and a moving story of sisterly love as well as their will to survive.