Top 99 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. For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.
Alexei Sayle
#3. 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
#5. Each returning soldier is an in-the-flesh memoir of war. Their chapters might vary, but similar imagery fills the pages, and the theme of every book is the same
profound change. The big question became, could I live with that kind of change?
Ellen Hopkins
#6. 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
#7. Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ...
Wallace Stegner
#8. Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.
Aleksandar Hemon
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Courage is just dreams with shoes on.
Reba Riley
#16. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Fact: upon locking yourself our of your apartment you will immediately need to use the bathroom. Fact: and then you will stand in place and watch your door. You will just stare. As though rebuffed by it. As though it has done this to you.
Augusten Burroughs
#21. 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
#22. Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.
David Herbert Donald
#23. People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.
Dorothy Allison
#24. You're very beautiful, dear', she said, 'what nationality are you, Indian?'
'No', I smiled, 'I'm Aboriginal.'
She looked at me in shock. 'You can't be,' she said.
'I am.'
'Oh, you poor thing,' she said, putting her arm around me, 'what on earth are you going to do?
Sally Morgan
#25. 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
#26. Bonding through caregiving..I don't think I'd ever realized until then that so much affection, so much heart connect, happens when we take care of someone.
Lindsey O'Connor
#27. When we apply the lessons we've struggled for our whole lives to learn to the lives of people we love, our love becomes judgment - which is toxic. Our fear our daughters will fail leads us to fail them.
Aspen Matis
#28. 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
#29. Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.
Mark Rowlands
#30. I learned in therapy the word "No" is a complete sentence.
Jaycee Dugard
#31. My handbag turned into a diaper bag for the chronically ill.
Tracey Berkowitz
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Love has no demand of us but to keep practicing, to do the next hard thing. Love says, Come dear. Take the next step.
Anna White
#36. Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.
Emily Gould
#37. It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#38. Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains.
Jeffrey Rasley
#39. Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding.
Meghan Lamb
#40. 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
#43. 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
#44. I wonder who else in the world was having such an exquisite dawn.
Hope Jahren
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. [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
#48. 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
#49. That's the thing about parents, I'm beginning to realize. You don't have to see them all that much to imitate them.
Leigh Newman
#50. If I wrote a memoir, it would be like 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.'
Annie Golden
#51. 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
#52. It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim
Jason Najum
#53. Negative self talk costs more than even the richest person can afford. So be nice to yourself whenever possible ... and know that it is always possible.
Doug Pedersen
#54. 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
#56. Sharing our personal stories makes us grateful for experiencing the radiance of being alive. Writing our personal stories documenting our vivid encounters with the larger world and examining our own time-tested ideas shapes the conception of our own being.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#58. We tried to change Vietnam. Instead, Vietnam changed us.
Tony Thomson
#59. You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.
Michael J. Fox
#60. After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree.
Jason Najum
#61. 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
#62. My mom used to tell me, "I don't like my mother, but I love her.
Aspen Matis
#64. May I see the beauty in others without denigrating my own.
Kimber Simpkins
#65. 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
#66. If you have ever been afraid, you may want to read my memoir.
If you have never been afraid, you may want to read it twice.
Peter Kurt Haarmeyer
#67. We look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look into our beliefs and see reality.
Kathryn Schulz
#68. There were signs everywhere but none that I could read or even hope to decipher. These multi-lined symbols unhinged my familiar world.
Gerry Abbey
#69. 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
#70. '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
#71. Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
Shirley Jackson
#72. I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin
Frank McCourt
#73. When you write your memoir you will understand, perhaps for the first time, the significance of your life through the language, images and emotions you craft from the memory.
Maureen Murdock
#74. I know what it's like to sleep in fear, to starve myself to be worthy, to be ashamed of my voice, to want to sleep forever. To question why I deserve to live.
Anna White
#75. 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
#76. How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.
Tracy Kidder
#77. 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
#78. Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.
Mary Karr
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. I felt ridiculously self-conscious, like the stick of celery at a luxurious buffet.
Fran Macilvey
#82. And some people have less star appeal than others, but sometimes they shine far brighter than those with more.
Mickey Leigh
#83. 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
#84. Cheryl Strayed reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir Wild, of what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe, physical and psychic hardship, and loss.
Mira Bartok
#85. I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.
Elie Wiesel
#86. 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
#87. I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him
they were part of his "road," the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work.
Joyce Johnson
#88. If you want self-esteem." "Do estimable acts" ~ V, from A Piece of Cake: Memoir
Cupcake Brown
#89. 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
#90. I may not be able to make a horse drink, but it is my duty to lead it to water.
Conrad Taylor
#92. When you want something, all the Universe conspires to helping you achieve it.
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Just ask..
Victoria Aldridge Washuk
#93. I considered not getting up, but recognized the pain of staying down was worse than the pain of attempting to stand.
Reba Riley
#94. One of the odder byways of nonfiction is the dishy memoir by those who have served the great or the near-great.
Robert Gottlieb
#95. The only thing to do with tears is water your flowers with them, so that there is something to show the world when the sun comes out.
Fran Macilvey
#96. I know I shouldn't introduce my own memoir with this amount of insecurity, but my personal life philosophy is always to assume the worst, then you're never disappointed. BAM! Highlight that previous sentence, baby!
Felicia Day
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
