Literary Memoir Quotes

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

Kate Zambreno

#2. Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#3. I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.

Sandra Cisneros

#4. Things end. Everything ends. But for a few days in a city full of hunger, and avarice, and alienation - in this fucked-up mess of a life spent wandering in the dark without a hand to hold on to - I was not alone. And neither were you.

Julio Alexi Genao

#5. In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.

John Wyndham

#6. Doubt is a lot like faith; A mustard's seed worth changes everything.

Donna Johnson

#7. The world is a penal institution.

Taylor Caldwell

#8. When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.

Walter Lippmann

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Power is sweet, and when you are a little clerk you love its sweetness quite as much as if you were an emperor, and maybe you love it a good deal more.

Ouida

#12. One thing about humans is that we all have them - lifestories. We live by and through them. But writers of memoir are particularly good at bringing literary strategies and form to experience (at least the good ones are).

Lidia Yuknavitch

#13. 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

#14. What we call matter is only a complex of energies which we find together in the same place.

Wolfgang Ostwald

#15. No matter what, when you major in theater arts whether you want to write or be a director or design scenery or whatever, when you are a freshman at UCLA then - I guess it's still the same way - you had to take an acting class.

Carol Burnett