Top 100 A Memoir Quotes
#1. Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.
Augusten Burroughs
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. It takes all my strength to do daily tasks. To some people, I'm just a number. I'm a projected food stamps debit card lifetime member. I'm seen as crazy or insane, but it doesn't matter. I know I am bigger than my suffering.
Jacquelyn Nicole Davis
#5. Gentleness is given to those who have learned that God will not have his kingdom triumph through the violence of the world, for such a triumph came through the meekness of a cross.
Stanley Hauerwas
#6. 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
#7. A deeply true, wholly aching account of the dangerous way we live now
LOVE JUNKIE is great fun to read, and finally fully redemptive. Rachel Resnick brings a light, delightful touch to a hard subject, and creates a great, relatable, readable memoir.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#8. If there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance?
Simon Pegg
#9. I encourage anyone who has gone through hardships to look back through their life's chapters and see what can be turned into a book. For you never know what heartache God, one day, can turn into a redemptive story.
Jolina Petersheim
#10. As an adult, getting paid thousands of dollars a week to say, "Aye, Sir. Course laid in" is a seriously sweet gig, but when I was a teenager, it sucked.
Wil Wheaton
#11. 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
#12. This is hell,
but I planned it. I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can't do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.
Alan Dugan
#13. The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners ...
Natalie Goldberg
#14. Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.
David Herbert Donald
#15. I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.
Lisa Scottoline
#16. Attempting to express a person's objective reality and subjective state of mind with the written word is an endless task because writing alters our perception of reality and amends our mental equilibrium.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#17. I learned in therapy the word "No" is a complete sentence.
Jaycee Dugard
#18. My handbag turned into a diaper bag for the chronically ill.
Tracey Berkowitz
#19. Where would the memoir be without bipolar writers? I mean, that's what - that whole oversharing thing is really a very clear symptom of bipolar disorder. And I'm not saying that every, you know, I'm not accusing every memoirist of being bipolar. But I think in a way it's kind of a gift.
Ayelet Waldman
#20. 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!
John Mihaljevic
#21. Leopold, one of the reporters who broke the Enron story, is now breaking his own story: how he got addicted to cocaine, committed grand theft, cleaned himself up and found happiness as a 'news junkie.' This scrappy memoir ... might become required reading for aspiring journalists.
Publishers Weekly
#22. Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.
Emily Gould
#23. I name you today, heart fears. I am small, but you are smaller. You will not stop me. You have a voice, fears, and I must listen, but then I will open my heart. I will love you right to death.
Anna White
#25. 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
#26. Lesson learned: Don't ever put a guy up on a pedestal. It's too easy for him to tip over and fall off.
Kate Madison
#27. [My father] was handsome and tanned and smelled wonderful, like a mix of the ocean and fresh-cut grass, except when he smoked his pipe, which also smelled wonderful, as how I thought wisdom must smell, when it curls about your head.
Carolyn Weber
#28. I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.
Anne Fadiman
#29. If I wrote a memoir, it would be like 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.'
Annie Golden
#30. Life is a delicate dance. We live in a society that governs we all get along. The invisible fine print, the unwritten rules and regulations state that we appease to each other's nature and in doing so, we by nature, seek to please.
Katandra Jackson Nunnally
#31. To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers.
Evan Osnos
#32. After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree.
Jason Najum
#33. 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
#34. 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!
Hilary Liftin
#35. Hey everyone. This is Elizabeth Stone, the one who wrote a A BOY I ONCE KNEW and BLACK SHEEP AND KISSING COUSINS. To those of you who read either one, thanks! But another Elizabeth Stone, not me, wrote WOMEN AND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION and VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. Just setting the record straight!
Elizabeth Stone
#36. 'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real ... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.
Tim O'Brien
#37. Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
Shirley Jackson
#38. I no longer believe there's any such thing as losing a woman. A man loses himself as women slip into the future.
Josh Wagner
#39. The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in - or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things.
Melissa Febos
#40. If variety is the spice of life, then my life must be one of the spiciest you ever heard of. A curry of a life. -Paul Child
Julia Child
#41. 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
#42. I felt ridiculously self-conscious, like the stick of celery at a luxurious buffet.
Fran Macilvey
#43. I do not really think Charlie knows much more about politics, history, or economics than I do. Like myself he was hit by a make-up towel almost before he was out of diapers.
Buster Keaton
#44. Have you ever gotten to a point where you looked at your own life, thought "Fu** this," and reached for the economy-sized Valium? Ah, suicide. So dark and seductive.
Rebecca O'Donnell
#45. If you want self-esteem." "Do estimable acts" ~ V, from A Piece of Cake: Memoir
Cupcake Brown
#46. You are not yourself in autobiography. It is never going to be you, it is only words on a page. Memories are unreliable, so adding the magic of imagination will make your story come alive.
K.H. Rennie
#47. I may not be able to make a horse drink, but it is my duty to lead it to water.
Conrad Taylor
#48. 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
#49. You know Becky, you haven't been the same since that crowbar fell on your head." - spoken by my mother after I eloped with a guy I'd known for about a month, when I was 18 years old!
Becky Lewellen Povich
#50. When facing a decision that stands a 50/50 chance of being correct, the choice made will be wrong 80% of the time. Rick Coxen
Frederick L. Coxen
#51. An intensely gripping narrative ... expertly crafted and totally addictive ... a must read!
Maggie Reese
#52. In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.
John Grogan
#53. I doubt that anyone has a Damascus moment after experiencing discrimination. Most people seem to have shining moments of change after experiencing grace.
Anna White
#54. '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
#55. Romance blossomed over a carrier bag full of mackerel. It wasn't exactly how I imagined it would happen; there were no sunsets, or butterflies, or birdsong, just some smelly dead fish and a slimy carrier bag.
Victoria Twead
#56. As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn't even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging chains and mixed with the rumbling mower and the buzzing insects.
Gerry Abbey
#58. Everyone has a colorful life. You just have to get out your crayons.
Benay Nordby
#59. In this candid and rounded memoir, Baksi answers the questions a multitude of Larsson's fans have already asked about his upbringing; the recurring death threats; his insomnia and his vices; his feminism
Stieg Larsson
#60. I would not say I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an 18-year-old novice in a religious community, as an agnostic graduate student, as - but who cares about my disguises? Or God's.
Mary Rose O'Reilley
#61. To tell a tale so great as to tear the soul inside out
Sara Niles, Torn From the Inside Out
Sara Niles
#62. The vicar's handshake was warm and reassuring, but shaking hands with Mavis was like clutching a bunch of dead twigs.
Victoria Twead
#63. Remember how we put stickers with your name on your pocessions that could be stolen.We didn't put a sticker on your innocence so don't lose it!
Candace Allan
#64. We both knew what it was to hurt our bodies. It's a strange reason to bond with someone, but I think we both needed to feel understood, and, even though we couldn't love ourselves, we could love each other.
Melissa C. Water
#65. If you bill something as a memoir, you're implying that everything in it is true.
David Benioff
#66. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. We don't choose the experience but we do choose how we react to the experience we have. Choose to be positive, choose to be helpful, choose to be happy.
Paula Coffer
#67. Never let a man determine the woman you want to be.
Maranda Evans
#68. The contemporary memoir is playing an important role in at least just bringing certain relationships out into the open in American society, and also it's a place where the novel of development, the novel of consciousness, has gone.
Marco Roth
#69. 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
#70. I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .
George Packer
#71. 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.
Condoleezza Rice
#72. It is an empty room, that afterwards, a soledad, and it sits there at the center of a person's life and waits to be filled.
Daisy Hernandez
#73. 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
#74. I think when life gets heavy, people look for an escape. "The Love Boat" is an escape. We have happy endings. You don't see many of those around. I think it gave people a vicarious adventure.
Gavin MacLeod
#75. 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
#76. The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
Alice McDermott
#77. The road to the heart is not a long, linear path, but this turning. There is no race or competition, just me and God going deeper, carving a canyon to the soul.
Anna White
#78. The memoirs of call girls are much in demand these days - a millennial craze.
Dimitra Ekmektsis
#79. The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.
Donald Miller
#80. She has learned to love. To fear. To hate. And then to love again. Through it all, she writes." ~Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl
Kimberly Kinrade
#81. I ended up in the back seat of a chicken truck's cab heading through beautiful scenery and disastrous roads to my hotel. About an hour later, we stopped to sell a few hundred of the chickens to a butcher shop.
Jennifer S. Alderson
#82. Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.
Gillian Marchenko
#83. Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.
Fern Schumer Chapman
#84. Is that the ultimate need? To secure some agent to act as a salve, a bandage, a cover-up, concealer over the black eye, as opposed to facing the issue head on. Nobody wants to address the fist. We'd all much rather take something for the pain and make it all go away.
Katandra Jackson Nunnally
#85. Doubt is a lot like faith; A mustard's seed worth changes everything.
Donna Johnson
#86. 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
#87. Even wondered about the difference?
Autobiography: The usually self-serving accounts of personal accomplishments by a public figure.
Memoir: The usually self-serving accounts of someone whose only accomplishments are often self-pity and vindictiveness.
Raul Ramos Y Sanchez
#88. And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.
Gerry Abbey
#89. I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.
Haruki Murakami
#90. The first novel I wrote, 'The White House Mess,' was a comic novel. It came out in 1986. It was a parody in the form of a White House memoir.
Christopher Buckley
#91. 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
#92. This memoir is one of the most brutally honest books I've ever read. You will grow to believe, and cheer on, this flawed hero as he gains a liberating knowledge of himself.
Joe Loya
#93. When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.
Tayari Jones
#94. I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir.
Akhil Sharma
#95. What memoir of childhood doesn't at some point turn on the scent of a sweet pea or a freshly cut lawn or a boxwood hedge, to leap the fence of years?
Michael Pollan
#96. What if you had such severe schizophrenia that your life was just one hallucination after another? And what if people kept trying to drag you back out of those hallucinations, to prove that you weren't living in reality and that reality was nothing more than a psych hospital? Would you go?
Jonathan Harnisch
#97. I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.
Jim Harrison
#98. Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#99. A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art.
Julia Glass
#100. In life you'll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it's because they're stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance ... Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.
Marjane Satrapi
