Memoirist Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.

Mary Karr

#3. If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

Darin Strauss

#4. (Everywhere I go as a writer - especially if I'm in drag as a "memoirist" - such fears seem to be first and foremost on people's minds. People seem hungry, above all else, for permission, and a guarantee against bad consequences. The first, I try to give; the second is beyond my power.)

Maggie Nelson

#5. Whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:

Mary Karr

#6. The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.

Mary Karr

#7. The successful memoirist [blogger] respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to lie or embellish, but knows that truth is both different from facts and greater than facts, and not always their sum.

Bill Roorbach

#8. A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

Arthur Golden

#9. The tumults of time are oft passed by in records of the private memoirist; for our days consist not of the Senatorial speech and the refracted solar beam cast through heroic cloud, but rather of bread eaten, and ink blotted, and talk of the sermon, and walks along the whiskery avenues in the garden.

M T Anderson

#10. I don't know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it's always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.

Koren Zailckas

#11. I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.

Mary Karr

#12. To be a good biographer, you have to be an empiricist. You know, you have to gather the evidence, you have to keep an open mind, and you have to be objective. A memoirist goes in with all the baggage of a bad biographer.

Blake Bailey

#13. As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.

Mary Karr

#14. 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

#15. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom-or rather the movement toward it-that counts.

Vivian Gornick

#16. CSL - cock- sucking-lips.

Stylo Fantome

#17. If every lover was treated like they matter - everyday; valentine's day wouldn't be so 'special.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#18. You have to be passionate about something other than yourself!

William McNamara

#19. TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS ... guess Elvis use to say it alot and had necklaces made with initials TCB

Elvis Presley

#20. Yet, if the most frequent sex and apparently the best sex is that between married partners who are faithful to one another, is there not a hint that affection might be an important aspect of sex? Even love?

Andrew Greeley

#21. A writer doesn't solve problems. He allows them to emerge.

Friedrich Durrenmatt

#22. I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better."
The lady gave a discriminating smile.
"I am afraid there are moments in life when even Beethoven has nothing to say to us. We must admit, however, that they are our worst moments.

Henry James

#23. I don't like the piano player music of the movies, the Michael Nyman, and sometimes that piano music makes me puke. It's not really romantic. It's just trying to get your Pavlovian juices flowing because it's a technique now.

Charlemagne Palestine

#24. As I did, there, in perfect condition, to be admired by five sets of wondering eyes, was an enormous, glistening, moist, chocolate cake.

Brother Andrew

#25. Some days, like today, my aim and timing is so true it takes my breath away and I feel certain Mortain's hand guides my own.

Robin LaFevers

#26. Johnny Cash has always been larger than life.

Kris Kristofferson

#27. Next, I'm holding a bag of clothes, being herded toward an open door filled with sunlight. My briefs are still looped around my ankles, so I'm waddling, my erection swinging in front of me like a blind man's cane, and the talent wrangler has the nerve to say, 'Thank you for coming...

Chuck Palahniuk

#28. There are many things evil people can take from you. However, they can never steal your ability to laugh and laugh loud.

Shannon L. Alder

#29. Yes, a guide can help point the way to your own sense of self and your purpose in life. No, a guide can't replace your own search. When you are in your car driving through town, signposts can tell you where each road goes, but only you can turn the steering wheel.

Deepak Chopra