Top 99 Memoir Quotes
#1. I get kind of tired of the "But it's your life!" attitude about memoir. I wrote. I engaged in artistic production. I made a piece of art. Why the preciousness or mystical unicorns around "memoir"? I'm curious how you feel about it just now.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#2. Insightful and heartbreaking, but also wonderfully comedic in its gutsy honesty. A beautiful and powerful memoir.
Jonathan Ames
#3. There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.
Augusten Burroughs
#4. 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.
Richard Hell
#5. 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
#6. A Diogenesian search for an honest person would rarely lead to the author of a memoir.
Tony Blankley
#7. 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
#8. In 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 Sheehy
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I don't think anybody would be interested in my memoir - and my memory isn't very good either!
Peter Serafinowicz
#12. In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.
Edmund White
#13. 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
#14. 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.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#15. True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world
Patricia Hampl
#17. The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
Mary Karr
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.
Gary Shteyngart
#21. I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'
Tim O'Brien
#22. The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.
Kate Zambreno
#23. The term 'celebrity memoir' has gotten such a bad name now, but there used to be a little bit of an art form to it.
Rob Lowe
#24. Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form.
Carrie Fisher
#25. I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.
Walter Kirn
#26. Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of space exploration:
Mary Roach
#27. 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
#28. Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.
Jeanette Winterson
#29. A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
Arthur Golden
#31. Unless you're a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That's the quality I've found most consistently in those life-story writers I've met.
Mary Karr
#32. 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.
Cheryl Strayed
#33. Final installment of Things More Fun Than Reading the Sarah Palin Memoir: Driving into a tree, microwaving your head, and getting stabbed in the eye with a carrot.
David Letterman
#34. I'm not sure I ever would write a memoir.
Susan Ford
#35. To a certain extent that happens with all kinds of successful writers and artists and celebrities, but there is also something about the form of memoir that creates an eerie reader space of intimacy that is only "real" in the space of the text.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#36. I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
Leslie Fiedler
#37. I have a severe case of invisibility-plus-impulsive-behavior that I am calling, for the purposes of this memoir, Xamnesia. It
Lizzie Harwood
#38. I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if your life story would be lived on the edge of possibility, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in the other and truly believed that anything was possible.
Jean Houston
#39. George Bowering doesn't play fair. Baseball Love is so good there is no memoir in the league that can go up against it. Bowering has a sense of story and an eye for detail that eliminate the possibility that he was a lousy second baseman. Reading a home run is fun.
Robert Kroetsch
#40. 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.
Paul Auster
#41. Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument; they were also her chance for monumental revisionism.
Karen Abbott
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
Leslie Fiedler
#45. 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
#46. Memoir is about handing over you life to someone and saying, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn something from it.
Jeannette Walls
#47. The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.
Michiko Kakutani
#48. In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.
Kathryn Harrison
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.
Paul Auster
#54. 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
#55. What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century
Max Beerbohm
#56. 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
#57. Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.
Steve Bisley
#58. 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
#59. I stayed at 'Cosmo' well beyond my internship, moving up the ranks over some 15 years to become books editor, then brand director, then editor-at-large - editing everything from an excerpt of Gore Vidal's memoir to writing some of those juicy cover lines myself.
John Searles
#60. Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
Bill Ayers
#61. Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.
Carly Fiorina
#62. It can safely be said that no one has touched more lives, more deeply, than Death. Through this devastating memoir, it is hoped he will touch many, many more.
George Pendle
#63. 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.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#64. I guess that my opinion of writing about real people is informed by defenses of Joyce Maynard's memoir, that the experiences were a part of my life as well, and that I have the right to write about my life.
Marie Calloway
#65. 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
#66. The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die
maybe.
Steve Earle
#67. Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
Mary Karr
#68. There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.
Paul Auster
#69. It's a rare memoir that can tell a story that seems brand new, but Nina Here Nor There does it. This one-of-a-kind narrator undertakes a quest that is unmistakably timely. But in its yearning for awareness and connection, this book feels timeless.
K.M. Soehnlein
#70. When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.
Melissa Febos
#71. Devotion, 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 Shapiro
#72. 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.
Hilary Liftin
#73. Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction.
William Zinsser
#74. We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.
Martin Amis
#75. My generation must have despair. - Leonard Bernstein Ch 40/Dog Water Free, A Memoir
Michael Jay
#76. A remarkable memoir that's packed with anecdotes, advice and humor, all while maintaining a high level of dignity and self-awareness.
Steve Martin
#78. 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
#79. 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
#81. To put it squarely, as I say in my memoir, the eternal triangle has come full circle.
Muriel Spark
#82. 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
#83. I believe the personal is the collective. One of the ironies of writing memoir is in using the "I" it becomes an alchemical "we." This is the sorcery of literature.
Terry Tempest Williams
#84. 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
#85. Memoir today is like one big game of misery poker: The more outlandish, outrageous, or just plain out-there the recounted life, the more likely the book is to attract the attention of reviewers, talk-show bookers, and, ultimately, the public.
Ben Yagoda
#86. 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
#87. You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#89. When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word "memoir" on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.
Paul Auster
#90. If you've traveled independently through Tibet, Brandon Wilson's Yak Butter Blues will bring back memories ... this lively memoir is sure to provide a yak-scented whiff of nostalgia.
Hannah Nordhaus
#91. 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.
Jay Leno
#92. Technically a memoir, 'The Woman Warrior' becomes almost magical through its inclusion of folk tales, dreams, and revisions.
Karen Joy Fowler
#93. Boyd Shreave tore the page from Eugenie Fonda's memoir and, with a contemptuous flourish, wiped his ass with it.
Carl Hiaasen
#94. Phin, history is filled with false realities. If we stopped at what we know to be true, we'll never discover that it's actually false. The Earth would still be flat. -Ethan Cottington, Memoir of a Mermaid Book #1
Adrianna Stepiano
#95. A memoir is an invitation into another person's privacy.
Isabel Allende
#96. Memoir is a confabulation of what we think we remember about our past.
Catherine Sevenau
#97. A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.
Emma Donoghue
#98. With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
David Halberstam
#99. In 2005, my mad half, HER was born...
ME & HER: a Memoir of Madness, 2012.
Karen Tyrrell
#100. I'm a layperson. I barely got out of high school. I have no business telling people what to do or my big philosophy on life. I'm certainly not going to write any sort of memoir.
Jamie Lee Curtis
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