Top 100 Quotes About Memoirs
#1. I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.
Anne Lamott
#2. 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
#4. I rent a Jacobean-fronted hunting lodge in Hampshire from the National Trust and like to go there as much as possible. I've grown to love it so much, especially when writing my memoirs there at weekends.
Nicholas Haslam
#5. The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.
Matt Gallagher
#6. On resigning as collaborator on the memoirs of the former Wallis Warfield Simpson, new summaries, 6 October 1955. You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Cleveland Amory
#7. Lastly, 'Hang tough!' Never, ever give up regardless of the adversity. If you are a leader, a fellow who other fellows look to, you have to keep going.
Dick Winters
#8. None of my friends had grandparents like these. ... Tony and Desolina were exotic.
James Vescovi
#9. What most people see is a badge, behind and beyond the badge is what they need to know...the person.
Donna Brown
#10. What draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.
Lisa Cron
#11. Desolina and Tony had attended one-room schoolhouses until the third grade. ... According to Tony, there were hardly enough pencils and sober teachers to go around. [Author's grandparents educational background.]
James Vescovi
#12. He moved with the sound of pockets full of change and I knew my life would never be the same."- Anastasia from Master of the Universe Memoirs Book One
Anastasia Lily
#13. But listening to him [Barack Obama] speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state Senate.
Sarah Palin
#14. I knew that I had to write my memoirs.
Jane Fonda
#15. That night we slept apart, all those unexplored continents reemerged on the atlas of your bed.
Rosalyn D'Mello
#16. I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.
Brett Davern
#17. I don't see why I should be washed as well as hanged," quoth Kit.
from "The Memoirs of Jack Chelwood
Constance Savery
#18. I could never write my memoirs, just because too many people are still alive and would be hurt.
Bruce Willis
#20. Most of the time our inner voice tries to guide us to 'Truth' but we, out of our own vested interests, wish to continue living in our own self-created illusions because it suits our purpose or fulfils our needs.
Kapil Kumar Bhaskar
#21. When I was younger, I read all the great food memoirs, by M.F.K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin and Julia Child and Nicolas Freeling and Ruth Reichl, and felt flooded with a sense of comfort and safety.
Kate Christensen
#22. They [his readers, whom he asks to be his friends] will find that I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of first introducing it into minds which were ignorant of its charms (Casanova, p.34, Vol 1 Preface).
Giacomo Casanova
#23. I could make the title of my memoirs: 'It's got cinematic disaster written all over it.'
Peter Capaldi
#24. It's easy to write one's memoirs when one has a terrible memory.
Arthur Schnitzler
#25. I quickly became aware that the phrase "it can only get better" could very quickly turn into "it could always be worse," because it was.
Savannah Grace
#26. Historic figures have homes to visit for posterity; the Lord of history left no home. Luminaries leave libraries and write their memoirs; He left one book, penned by ordinary people. Deliverers speak of winning through might and conquest; He spoke of a place in the heart.
Ravi Zacharias
#27. Having to admit that you are depressed makes one feel less than. Broken. Yes, that's what it is. Broken.
Gillian Marchenko
#28. When dad says he's going to church, he actually means he's going to a library or a bookstore. - Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac.
Gabrielle Zevin
#29. 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
#31. But what I could see out of the corner of my eye made me think of two lovely bundles of silk floating along a stream. In a moment they were hovering on the walkway in front of me, where they sank down and smoothed their kimono across their knees.
Arthur Golden
#32. They were twenty-seven already, in no time at all they'd be thirty, terrifying. No one knew what would happen then. Michelle couldn't imagine anything more than writing zine-ish memoirs and working in bookstores.
Michelle Tea
#33. Some say it is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven. That is a defeatist attitude. I intend to rule everywhere, not just in Hell.
- General Agamemnon
New Memoirs
Brian Herbert
#34. Aw honey. Today's as important as forever." Grandpa Joe in "Shave and a Haircut" Flash Warden and Other Stories
Eileen Granfors
#35. I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.
Isabel Allende
#36. I've always liked the idea of memoirs, going into someone else's life, going through someone else's day and getting out of your own head.
Isabel Gillies
#37. Tattoos made my skin more 'me.' -Melissa Maxwell
Larry Smith
#38. People ask me if I am going to write my memoirs. But even if I wanted to, I would not be able. I have extremely few memories.
Bjorn Ulvaeus
#39. I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them.
Norman Lock
#40. People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.
Mark Leyner
#42. I realize my life here is much richer than I ever could have imagined. [Why one Canadian immigrant to Italy stays]
Ivanka Di Felice
#43. She talked in one of her memoirs of ignoring her little brother when she was supposed to be looking after him: I liked reading a book much more than I liked looking after him (and even now I like reading a book more than I like looking after my own children ... )
Jamaica Kincaid
#44. I have not written my memoirs for those young people who can only save themselves from falling by spending their youth in ignorance, but for those whom experience of life has rendered proof against being seduced, whom living in the fire has transformed into salamanders.
Giacomo Casanova
#45. The memoirs of call girls are much in demand these days - a millennial craze.
Dimitra Ekmektsis
#46. Autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.
George Eliot
#47. Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in mid-sentence. You simply need to figure out where each one starts and ends.
Ashly Lorenzana
#48. It's no secret that most memoirs are really self-help books in disguise.
Nathan Hill
#49. When I came home, I was asked to put my pictures in a photo exhibit at the Cinematography College ... my pictures won first prize. I began to ask myself what I was doing, and why. A few months after the exhibit, I dropped out of college, left my wife and began to write this book.
Vladislav Tamarov
#50. I'd worked at the White House for two years, and I'd read a bunch of White House memoirs because everybody who works at the White House, even for five minutes, writes a memoir usually not less than 600 pages long - and never without the word 'power' in the title.
Christopher Buckley
#51. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper. a
Arthur Golden
#53. Happily I didn't see her after she'd died, except for her legs, which were visible from the doorway and looked like slender tree limbs wrapped in wrinkled silk. - Chapter 10, pg 124
Arthur Golden
#54. I'm very detail oriented. I think that's why people enjoy my memoirs - because I tend to remember everything.
Jen Lancaster
#55. At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.
Nigel Hamilton
#56. Memoirs lie, but fiction tells the truth.
Philip Roth
#57. It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state ...
James Clerk Maxwell
#58. I have been presented with roles with demand not just a physical ability but mental disciplines as well. 'Memoirs of a Geisha' was not so much about physical exertion ... it was much more graceful and contained than that.
Michelle Yeoh
#59. I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.
Vivian Gornick
#61. The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I've read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#62. Moments fly, memories remain; and then memories fly, only memoirs remain and finally memoirs disappear, nothing remains!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#63. Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end.
George Meredith
#64. The reality is that when you visit Italy, you'll be hijacked by relatives of all sorts; the entire family tree is waiting to meet you. [A hyphenated Italian's risk]
Ivanka Di Felice
#65. Memoirs have at their heart a content that "happened" to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face?
Lidia Yuknavitch
#67. Memoirs? No, we want a how-to book. For spies." "A how-to book?! A book can't teach someone how to be equal parts deadly and sexy! That's like asking a cobra to write a book about how to be a cobra!
Sterling Archer
#68. I had worked for George Bush as a speechwriter, and I read a lot of White House memoirs. They all have two themes: 'It Wasn't My Fault' and 'It Would Have Been Much Worse if I Hadn't Been There.'
Christopher Buckley
#70. Honestly, all crows are not ravens
Munia Khan
#71. Sometimes, I'll craft a scene that's so poignant; on the last keystroke I'll raise my hands high overhead and scream "Yes!" at the top of my lungs. I have yet to experience an orgasm so powerful and fulfilling.
Max Hawthorne
#72. Perhaps the reason memoirs are so often written by the young these days is that, once you reach a certain age, only fiction might allow you to truly make your way back to childhood.
Tom Engelhardt
#73. Early retirement, Dalton. Teach yourself to type with your toes and you
can start writing your memoirs.
Mark Allen Smith
#74. I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.
Mary Karr
#76. Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I've been able to use my life as a lesson.
Jane Fonda
#77. 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
#78. Not for nothing, but if you do that again, I'm gonna have to punch ya fuckin' heart out!
Cyndi Lauper
#79. I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. It's easier to get to the truth by not claiming that you are speaking it. Some things can be said in fiction that can never be said in memoir.
Armistead Maupin
#81. But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.
Gabrielle Zevin
#82. We have a racially based justice system that overpunishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn't make us safer.
Piper Kerman
#83. When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that's Memoirs.
Will Rogers
#84. ...To see your life flow in obscurity among the treasures of the heart and of nature, happy in your anonymity, and to occasionally lose yourself in reading or in the pleasure of being a sensitive admirer of the fine arts; that's the image of modern life you're looking for!
Paul Amadeus Dienach
#85. I was just thinking... isn't it lucky that we decided to become co-editors? If one takes a blow to the head, the other can fill in. If the other's lung spontaneoulsy collapses, the one can fill in. It's a perfect system once you think about it."
~Will Landsman
Gabrielle Zevin
#86. I love memoirs and biographies, learning about other people's lives. Two of the ones that I loved so much were actually edited by the same person who edited my book, too. I loved 'Angela's Ashes.' I loved 'Glass Castle' so much.
Isabel Gillies
#87. The memoir industry is, what's the word? Under regulated. I think it needs to be pruned. If there are too many books right now and the market for readers is shrinking, I think we can get rid of many of the memoirs. Another memoir should be awfully well justified before it gets published.
Arthur Phillips
#88. A lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving.
William J. Clinton
#89. I'm not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future be
Arthur Golden
#90. For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.
Anthony Bourdain
#91. Many things embarrass me, but reading isn't one of them. I'm not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.
Tom Rachman
#92. Love hurts because it holds hearts
Munia Khan
#93. Whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age-too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.
John F. Kennedy
#94. It turns out, after a lot of exploration, that I'm not really a princess. A swell gal, sure, but not a princess.
Julie Klam
#95. Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.
James Frey
#96. If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one.
Edward Ball
#97. Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation.
Mary Karr
#98. Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the President. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
David Letterman
#99. I'm going to write a book about an intelligent woman who does stupid things when it comes to men. I'll call it, "My Memoirs.
N.M. Silber
#100. I sold my memoirs of my love life to Parker Brothers and they are going to make a game out of it.
Woody Allen
