Top 100 Quotes About Memoir Writing
#1. 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
#2. I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have.
Pauline Kael
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die
maybe.
Steve Earle
#6. I looked out again at the rising moon and I let the weight of my day, my week, lift away with the rushing wind as I was blown into the depths of myself.
Gerry Abbey
#7. 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
#8. Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
Bill Ayers
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.
Steve Bisley
#12. 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
#13. Telling our personal story reveals the shape shifting landscape of our mind.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#14. Meandering cows, tenacious bicyclers, belching taxis, rickshaws, fearless pedestrians and the occasional mobile 'cigarette and sweets' stand all fought our taxi for room on the narrow two-lane road turned local byway.
Jennifer S. Alderson
#15. Being a maverick traveller, one would like to place oneself in the place of a local; just listen without judgement.
Mary Jane Walker
#16. The whole world is like an opened candy jar, and we're plunging in for the best treats
Vicki Alayne Bradley
#17. 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
#18. Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.
Stephen King
#19. Art is a distinct form of human communication. Art interprets experience, sensation, and feelings. An artistic work translates our mental images and allows other people to understand what we feel; art conveys our happiness, sadness, hopes, doubts, anxieties, fears, desires, and ineffable longings.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#21. 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
#22. The ordinary stories of our ordinary lives have extraordinary gifts coded within them ...
Christina Baldwin
#23. 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
#24. You know, everybody's ignorant, just on different subjects.
Will Rogers
#25. All throughout our lives, we selectively draw on selected shavings of life events and reflect upon them through consciousness, creating an arranged catalogue of senses, faculties, and mental activities that compose our personal life story.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#26. 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
#27. When I first got sick, they told me I had a year to live, and I was writing my memoir really fast. There were really weird things happening with my nervous system and my heart and stuff, and it didn't look like I was gonna make it, so I was writing really fast, and then I couldn't write anymore.
John Lurie
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. I like how writing can take you off for a jaunt in your head and then set you back down in the chair where you've been all along.
Georgann Low
#31. Our stories are our best gifts--treasure and share them!
Gail Kittleson
#32. I'm not one of those people who's so blinded by my own work and my sweat. It's kind of risky writing a memoir when you're really part of a larger universe.
Questlove
#33. Writing the story of their own life allows the author to parse their story into examinable segments while continuing to engage in the act of communion and creation.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#34. Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.
Rick Moody
#35. I think this is the essence of life: to be willing circle back, to fall in deeper, to relearn what I thought I already knew.
Anna White
#36. Stephen King have a lot of books about the writing not only "The Writting: Memoir and Craft", but and "Nightmares and Dreamscapes", however "Misery", also and "Bag of Bones" and even and others. Which is awesome, different perspectives for being a an writer.
Deyth Banger
#37. Sometimes I dream that I'm writing a memoir. A memoir would just be the thing to keep me in the hearts and memories of my adoring public.
John Green
#38. It was one of those striking moments in life where you find familiarity in the inexplicable.
Gerry Abbey
#39. When Tito was born, I was writing my fifth novel.
That was how I saw my future: living in Venice and jumping from novel to novel.
Tito's birth changed all that.
Diogo Mainardi
#41. What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.
Darin Strauss
#42. Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.
Caitlin Doughty
#43. Charles Blow's memoir 'Fire Shut Up in My Bones' was a breathtaking piece of writing.
Andrew Rosenthal
#44. Wilds whisper, yet I long for their roar.
Gin Getz
#45. The minute I landed back in Alaska, it was back to hip boots and fish guts. This cultural flipping wasn't easy - especially on top of the post-divorce fighting that was still going on between my parents. But this is why you don't write a memoir at age fourteen.
Leigh Newman
#46. People naturally impose a narrative story-line upon their experiences. Autobiographical writing allows a person to cast their experiences into a narrative thread and organize their thoughts based not upon conjecture but with applied reason.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#47. I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?
Yiyun Li
#48. Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer!
Gerry Abbey
#49. It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.
Cheryl Strayed
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. An intensely gripping narrative ... expertly crafted and totally addictive ... a must read!
Maggie Reese
#53. And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.
Gerry Abbey
#54. Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.
Gillian Marchenko
#55. Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?
Slash Coleman
#56. I ended up in the back seat of a chicken truck's cab heading through beautiful scenery and disastrous roads to my hotel. About an hour later, we stopped to sell a few hundred of the chickens to a butcher shop.
Jennifer S. Alderson
#57. The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.
Donald Miller
#58. I'm a memoir writer. I try to understand the world by taking experiences I have and making them into a story, whether it's a narrative memoir, blogging for The Huffington Post, writing poems, or talking on the screen about what has happened to me and how that relates to the world at large.
Staceyann Chin
#59. It was actually fun to write [memoir], because I went back to interview people my parents had taught or who had worked with them, and I learned a lot about them that I hadn't known.
Condoleezza Rice
#60. I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .
George Packer
#61. Lesson learned: If you're already resorting to writing shitty poetry (not the lovey-dovey kind) to get your guys attention within one month of meeting him, he is not the one.
Kate Madison
#62. Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution.
Marco Roth
#63. As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn't even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging chains and mixed with the rumbling mower and the buzzing insects.
Gerry Abbey
#64. I don't feel any ethical dilemma when I write. In my memoir, I was able to write with candor about the two most difficult people in the world to write with candor about - mom and dad. Everything else is downhill from there.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#65. Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#66. 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
#67. 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
#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. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ...
Wallace Stegner
#77. Writing a memoir isn't particularly interesting to me. I'm not like Ellen [DeGeneres], where I can write, 'Water bottles
they're crazy!' and it's funny.
Lauren Graham
#78. 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
#79. Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction can be difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.
Stephen King
#80. I live my memoirs, I don't have to write them down.
Karl Lagerfeld
#81. As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death.
Craig Briggs
#82. What I wanted was to write a memoir that was immersive rather than reflective, to resurrect a long-gone version of my own consciousness. I kept expecting that sooner or later the effort would come to seem like second nature to me, but it never did.
Kevin Brockmeier
#83. One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can't drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.
Andre Dubus III
#84. If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.
Baby Halder
#85. It is important to measure ourselves at least once in life, undertake a personal odyssey that constructs a clarifying prism of our being.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#86. In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.
Sherman Alexie
#87. Even now, I am anxious about the naked thoughts that I have shared. The observations are blisteringly honest and of course they have to be.
John Conrad
#88. I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.
Sue Monk Kidd
#89. 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
#90. Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture.
Mary McCarthy
#91. Writing about oneself is an egotistical adventure unless the act of self-exploration revolves around the distinct goal of heightening a person's cache of knowledge, ideas, and level of self-awareness.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#92. I'm writing this memoir from the perspective of somebody who's prosperous and has means. Having said that, one of the things that I think I discovered about those additional years is that I don't think they really are added to the end of life.
Anna Quindlen
#93. When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say 'all kinds,' but really I mean I don't write any kind at all: I'm trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together.
Leslie Jamison
#94. Expectation is the dirtiest word in a traveler's vocabulary.
John Early
#95. I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.
Peter Carey
#96. Writing evinces the soul of an active mind and every era produced persons whom devoted their being to exploring the mysteries of life, seeking to discern answers pertaining how to resolve the complexities and paradoxes of life.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#97. Unless you bring a beating heart into your message, it is dead' (Author unknown)
That's why I wrote my how-to book, "Don't Write your MEmoir without ME". If there's no "this is me" in your memoir, it won't resonate with your readers the way you hope it will.
Viga Boland
#98. I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.
Mitch Albom
#100. The discipline of writing a memoir comes in the editing. This is where I cut, slash, and burn - where my creative mind is transformed into a ruthless one. No word escapes my scrutiny. It is here where I see what boundaries need to be set.
Terry Tempest Williams
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