Memoirist's Quotes

#1. 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

#2. If you steal my artwork, you will pay. In cash.

Nick Simmons

#3. 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

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

Mary Karr

#5. Anywhere I hang my heart is home ... it's just the closet that keeps moving.

Wavy Gravy

#6. A cicada whines,
his voice
Starting to drown through the rainy world,
No ripple of wind,
no sound but his song of black wings,
No song but the song of his black wings.
Such emptiness at the heart,
such emptiness at the heart of being,

Charles Wright

#7. 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

#8. If you live a life of make-believe, your life isn't worth anything until you do something that does challenge your reality. And to me, sailing the open ocean is a real challenge, because it's life or death.

Morgan Freeman

#9. 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

#10. I don't know what a hard-ass feminist is. I'm a feminist, which only means that I think men and women deserve equal treatment. Hardly a groundbreaking concept. But I'm sure you're about to give an example of where I failed in that.

Kelley Armstrong

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. The easiest thing in the world is to be what you are, what you feel. The hardest thing to be is what other people want you to be.

Leo Buscaglia

#14. 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

#15. That boy was going to be the death of me.

Jessica Prince

#16. Autistic adults were once autistic kids. We grow up and need acceptance and understanding as well.

Tina J. Richardson

#17. True worth is in being, not seeming

Alice Cary

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

Arthur Golden

#19. There was a sudden stillness like the gap between ticks on a clock, but the next tick never coming.

Sadie Jones

#20. Does Mike Wazowski blink or wink??

Pete Docter

#21. 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

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

Mary Karr

#23. I know the way you move. I know the way you look at me. I see you see me, and you're the only one who looks at me that way. Whether I'm with you or away from you, I don't have to think about it or put the puzzle pieces together. It's just you. That's what I know.

Jennifer Niven

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

Mary Karr

#25. (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

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

Darin Strauss

#27. The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#28. 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

#29. We are an American family and we rise and fall together as one nation.

Barack Obama