Top 100 A Memoir Quotes
#1. The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.
Salman Rushdie
#2. When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.
Dave Eggers
#3. Just as there can be a hole in these narratives, a memoir can be as much about what's forgotten as what's remembered.
Jane Alison
#4. 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.
Frederick Buechner
#5. Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.
David Herbert Donald
#6. Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.
Darin Strauss
#7. If I wrote a memoir, it would be like 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.'
Annie Golden
#8. It's a memoir of various events in my own life, but it's also a teaching book: along the way I explain the writing decisions I made. They are the same decisions that confront every writer going in search of his or her past: matters of selection, reduction, organization and tone.
William Zinsser
#9. 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.
Larry Heinemann
#10. You don't have to be a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to figure out that when you title a memoir of your parents 'Them,' you're performing an act of distancing.
Robert Gottlieb
#11. 'Amazing Grace' is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It's a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don't think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter.
Jonathan Kozol
#12. If you bill something as a memoir, you're implying that everything in it is true.
David Benioff
#13. Just Another Number was meant to be unresolved because resolving it would destroy its authenticity. It's a memoir. I am unresolved as a human being. And it also leaves room for a sequel.
Maggie Young
#14. Felicia's place is always off the edge of the map, where dragons wait, and this story is more than a memoir. It's a quest. If you wanna survive, stay close to the redhead.
She knows her way.
Felicia Day
#15. I'm a memoir writer. I try to understand the world by taking experiences I have and making them into a story, whether it's a narrative memoir, blogging for The Huffington Post, writing poems, or talking on the screen about what has happened to me and how that relates to the world at large.
Staceyann Chin
#16. The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.
Donald Miller
#17. I'd worked at the White House for two years, and I'd read a bunch of White House memoirs because everybody who works at the White House, even for five minutes, writes a memoir usually not less than 600 pages long - and never without the word 'power' in the title.
Christopher Buckley
#18. 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 Allende
#19. I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir.
Akhil Sharma
#20. I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.
Jim Harrison
#21. For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.
Akhil Sharma
#22. The discipline of writing a memoir comes in the editing. This is where I cut, slash, and burn - where my creative mind is transformed into a ruthless one. No word escapes my scrutiny. It is here where I see what boundaries need to be set.
Terry Tempest Williams
#23. No entrepreneur ever wrote a memoir that said, 'Then I did something terribly risky and not all that clever, but once again fortune chose to reward my stupidity.
Tim Dowling
#24. Heartbreaking and brave, Rachel Resnick masterfully pulls the past to the present, exploring how the seeds of addiction planted during an unhappy girlhood can blossom into a grown-up woman's frantic search for love. LOVE JUNKIE is a memoir unlike any other; it will blow your mind.
Lee Montgomery
#25. Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.
John Irving
#26. A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.
Isabel Allende
#27. 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.
Nick Flynn
#28. I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
Rachel Cusk
#29. 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.
Annie Dillard
#30. I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.
Mitch Albom
#31. My book 'Trust Your Heart', which is the story of my life, will be followed by 'Singing Lessons', a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.
Judy Collins
#32. Two people, one city, different times; connected by a memoir. Can love exist in a city destined for decades of misery?
Ahmad Ardalan
#33. What a gift, the gift of recognition. The gift of permission. Be who you are. It means everything, and when others who matter give it to you, it becomes easier, though never easy, to give that permission to yourself. Gregory Martin: Stories For Boys: A Memoir
Gregory Martin
#34. I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don't ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#35. Oftentimes, if a writer really gets her hooks into me, I'll want to read interviews, or listen to an interview, or read a literary biography or a memoir of some kind. And doing so almost always deepens my enjoyment of the author and her work.
Brad Listi
#36. When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.
Conor Oberst
#37. I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.
Peter Carey
#38. She tells me life is a story. We can make it a Harlequin romance, a mistery, a memoir. We can make it pamphlet-size or an ongoing series.
"I want mine to be exceptional", she says.
Katie Kacvinsky
#39. I would never do a printed memoir. I've been asked to publish a memoir from years by different publishers and literary agents. I think it wouldn't be great for me because all I'd really want to talk about it music and I'd rather just play it.
Natalie Merchant
#40. A memoir emerges from facts and dreams, and tells the story we have almost forgotten.
by Mary Stobie
Mary Stobie
#41. By calling it a memoir, I meant is as a collection of memories. I thought it was (a more) artful (title) than documentary.
Natalie Merchant
#42. In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.
David Leavitt
#43. In 2005, my mad half, HER was born ...
ME & HER: a Memoir of Madness, 2012.
Karen Tyrrell
#44. I happened upon a memoir by a midlevel White House staffer, and he had been in the room that [Nixon's last] night [in office]. This guy's memoir told me what Nixon's last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: "Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!" That was just so bizarre.
Harry Shearer
#45. I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring.
Harlan Coben
#46. A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.
Richard Hell
#47. Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture.
Mary McCarthy
#48. Alchemy of the Afterlife A Memoir Linda Kinnamon, RN Flatirons Press
Linda Kinnamon
#49. 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.
Lauren Graham
#50. The Stovepipe is a memoir full of laughter and tears and a moving story of sisterly love as well as their will to survive.
Dave Pelzer
#51. Of the twenty- three men and women who served in Dwight Eisenhower's cabinets, only one, the secretary of agriculture, published a memoir afterward, and it was so discreet as to be soporific.
David Brooks
#52. In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.
Sherman Alexie
#53. A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom.
David Shields
#54. One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can't drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.
Andre Dubus III
#55. Who among us is free? Only those who see their chains know what freedom means.-pg. 123 Welland Hevington, A Memoir The Demon's Daughter
Emma Holly
#56. What I wanted was to write a memoir that was immersive rather than reflective, to resurrect a long-gone version of my own consciousness. I kept expecting that sooner or later the effort would come to seem like second nature to me, but it never did.
Kevin Brockmeier
#57. Having a memoir and a retrospective of your work running almost simultaneously when you're still alive does feel a bit posthumous.
Anthony Browne
#58. Then one night we used the baby's head as a bong. (I'm pretty sure that's the only time that sentence has ever been used in a memoir. One would hope. I'd check it out on the Internet, but to be honest; that whole horse-enema-fetish stuff scared the shit out of me, so I'm not even going to look.)
Jenny Lawson
#59. A Diogenesian search for an honest person would rarely lead to the author of a memoir.
Tony Blankley
#60. 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.
Mitch Albom
#61. The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.
Harlan Ellison
#62. 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.
Joyce Carol Oates
#63. In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.
Edmund White
#64. 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).
Gore Vidal
#65. 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.
Gary Shteyngart
#66. I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.
Paul Auster
#67. A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
Arthur Golden
#69. I'm not sure I ever would write a memoir.
Susan Ford
#70. When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.
Julia Cameron
#71. Some of my favorite contemporary Montana writers and their books include Annick Smith's Homestead, a memoir of her experiences, along with her husband and four children, homesteading in the Blackfoot Valley on 163 acres in the 1960s; Deirdre
Nancy Pearl
#72. 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.
Augusten Burroughs
#73. Lost Decency (a memoir) covers three phases of Afghanistan's last 50 years (Where it was? What Happened and Where it is headed?)
Atta Arghandiwal
#74. 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.
Nick Earls
#75. You get a bad review with a novel, and it hurts. But I imagine if you get a bad review with a memoir, it hurts more because you can always say, 'Well, they didn't like my characters,' but when you're the character, it's like, 'Oh, yeah, they actually didn't like me.'
Darin Strauss
#76. I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.
Augusten Burroughs
#77. Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on.
Anna Quindlen
#78. Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and poofs read or write now. Otherwise, these days, no sooner has someone been sodomised by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir. The game's up.
Hanif Kureishi
#79. Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.
Steve Bisley
#80. When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.
Koren Zailckas
#81. Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
Bill Ayers
#82. Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.
Carly Fiorina
#83. I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary.
Deborah Copaken Kogan
#84. The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die
maybe.
Steve Earle
#85. I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.
Jami Attenberg
#86. The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw.
David Sedaris
#87. A memoir, at its heart, is written in order to figure out who you are.
Sean Wilsey
#88. It's never the act but the impact of the act that is crucial in a memoir.
David Leite
#89. The minute I landed back in Alaska, it was back to hip boots and fish guts. This cultural flipping wasn't easy - especially on top of the post-divorce fighting that was still going on between my parents. But this is why you don't write a memoir at age fourteen.
Leigh Newman
#90. Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.
Caitlin Doughty
#91. What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.
Darin Strauss
#92. Sometimes I dream that I'm writing a memoir. A memoir would just be the thing to keep me in the hearts and memories of my adoring public.
John Green
#93. If I were a lesbian and had a thing for narcissistic ex-sorority girls? I'd totally do me.
Bitter is the New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smart-Ass, or Why You Should Never Carry a Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office: A Memoir
Jen Lancaster
#94. I would be so mad if I saw something called a memoir, and then it was Mike Birbiglia. It would be so infuriating. It's like, 'Who is this guy, and why does he have a memoir?' David Letterman could write a memoir. Joan Rivers could. I'm just a nobody. I'm a comedian and a writer.
Mike Birbiglia
#95. 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.
Questlove
#96. I 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 Crosley
#97. A memoir should have some uplifting quality, inspiring or illuminating, and that's what separates a life story that can influence other people.
Mitch Albom
#98. 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.
Jeannette Walls
#99. The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. - VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory: A Memoir
Sheldon Solomon
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
