Popular quotes about Memoir! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons.
Isabel AllendeGoing from memoir to fiction was fantastic. I had been afraid to move away from memoir; I'd written some novel drafts, but they weren't well received by my agent at the time, and it had been drilled into me that "memoir outsells fiction two to one" (not sure if that's true anymore, or if it ever was), so I felt like the only smart thing to do, professionally, was to keep mining my life for painful moments to recapitulate.
Janice ErlbaumYou write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.
Elizabeth GilbertWhen I was writing the memoir, every page was a battle with myself because I knew I had to tell the truth. That's what the memoir form demands. I also had to figure out how much of the truth do I tell, how do I make the truth as balanced as I possibly can? How do I make these people as complicated and as human and as unique and as multifaceted as I possibly can? For me, that was the way I attempted to counteract some of that criticism.
Jesmyn WardFormer president George W. Bush released his new memoir. By the way, 'memoir' is just a fancy word for 'a bunch of stuff that happened to me.
Craig FergusonI 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.
Jill TalbotI feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications.
Meghan DaumI don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.
Sloane CrosleyI never felt inspired to write this book [ I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse?], like I did with the cat or dog book; I felt compelled. At the time (May 1999), I was planning to write and illustrate an altogether different memoir, a book about my decision whether or not to have a baby.
Suzy BeckerIn my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.
Gail SheehyI disagree that Blood Will Out is a memoir in the conventional sense. It's the story of a relationship, primarily, not an individual. The "me" in the book is a specialized version of me, the person who Clark manipulated and fooled. I could cover the same years of my life from an entirely different perspective in another book, by concentrating on my experience as a husband, say. But I was selective. I focused on my duping.
Walter KirnI think that today's books, in which every quote, every conversation, is taken from a memoir, an autobiography, an interview, or what-have-you, are much more convincing.
Russell FreedmanI believe that the memoir is the novel of the 21st century; itโs an amazing form that we havenโt even begun to tapโฆweโre just getting started figuring out what the rules are.
Susan CheeverI remember when I was writing my memoir and I was worried about what other people would think when they read it, and my mother, who can be this incredibly wise person, said that it really didn't matter because strangers who read it would never meet me anyway, and people I knew were aware of my secrets.
Katy LedererOne of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you canโt drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.
Andre DubusWhen I decided to write about my brother and friends, I was attempting to answer the question why. Why did they all die like that? Why so many of them? Why so close together? Why were they all so young? Why, especially, in the kinds of places where we are from? Why would they all die back to back to back to back? I feel like I was writing my way towards an answer in the memoir.
Jesmyn WardI dont know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, its always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.
Koren ZailckasI'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.
Lourdes PortilloThe nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.
Kate ZambrenoIt [the memoir "In The Body of the World"] wrote me. I joke about it, but this book was so unusual. It just started to come out. I really feel like it came straight from my body. I think it was both an expression of what I had gone through, but also it just felt like everything had come together in my body and it needed to tell that story.
Eve EnslerThe journey toward authenticity, toward becoming whole is made palpable in Maureen Seaton's Sex Talks to Girls: A Memoir. It shines its considerable light on the passage from religion toward faith, from self-medication to sobriety, from daughterhood to motherhood, from being the disembodied 'good girl' to embracing her own bad lesbian self. In crisp chapters, Seaton leads us, step-by-step, over this harrowing and blissful road, so distinct from yet so much like our own.
Terry WolvertonIn the 19th century, the English were loathed. Every memoir that you read of that period, indicates the loathing that everybody felt for the English, the only difference between the English and Americans, in this respect, is the English rather liked being loathed and the Americans apparently dislike it intensely.
Malcolm MuggeridgeUpdike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.
Rick MoodyDevotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.
Dani ShapiroFiction 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.
Lidia YuknavitchI was always worried about the dishonesty and meretriciousness that often accompanies ego. So I tried to make the memoir as factual and accurate and as unemotional as I could, and let readers make their own judgments on what happened. And, in fact, that's how I write poetry. I'm trying to present the reader with the experience itself, not with my commentary on it. So I adopted a style that I'd hoped would let me accomplish that.
Dan BurtAs a blogger, Chez Pazienza is filled with outrage, passion and insight -- delivered with a distinctive point of view, a wicked sense of humor, and a two-fisted style of prose. In Dead Star Twilight, he turns all these on himself -- and produces a fierce, funny, disturbing, but ultimately uplifting memoir. This is the book A Million Little Pieces dreamed of being.
Arianna Huffington