Top 100 Quotes About Memoirs
#2. Memoirs of An Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Returned from a Thirteen Years' Slavery in America, Where He was Sent by the Wicked Contrivances of His Cruel Uncle, etc. Part II Concludes with a Summary View of the Trial. 2 volumes. London: 1743.
Anonymous
#3. What are you going to do with astronauts who first reach the surface of Mars and then turn around and rocket back home-ward? What are they going to do, write their memoirs? Would they go again? Having them repeat the voyage, in my view, is dim-witted. Why don't they stay there on Mars?
Buzz Aldrin
#4. I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.
John Major
#5. If you don't write your memoirs down then time will swallow them up, leaving no leftovers.
Sahara Sanders
#6. I grew up reading Holocaust literature at the beach, Gulag literature on winter holidays, Vietnam memoirs on spring break.
Michael Hastings
#8. We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.
Elliott Colla
#9. to do with Lottie's final wishes for her memoirs. With the help of Millie and Henry, Fran and
Meredith Kennon
#10. In her memoirs she writes that she left the hospital job because it eventually made her numb to suffering, and it left her no time to write. She neglected
David Brooks
#11. As far as being territorial about one's own life, that's a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for "material." Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#12. I bet when Winston Churchill was writing his memoirs he didn't keep getting interrupted by two blokes bawling that the ties they took off the night before had mysteriously disappeared, and demanding I find them, seeing as I was the one last seen tied up with them.
Gillibran Brown
#13. Why was there so much work-sharing in the 1930s? One reason is that government pushed for it. In his memoirs, President Herbert Hoover estimated that as many as two million workers avoided unemployment as a result of his efforts to promote work-sharing.
Barry Eichengreen
#14. A remarkable number of the memoirs of booksellers are basically anecdote delivery devices.
Travis McDade
#15. Do you know about the horrors during the Time of Titans? Or the Hrethgir Rebellions?" "I've read my father's memoirs in great detail - " "I don't mean Agamemnon's propaganda. Have you learned the real history?
Brian Herbert
#16. Listen, in England people are already writing their memoirs at the age of 23.
Rupert Everett
#17. People in a connected world are exposed to the stories of strangers through many channels, including face-to-face encounters, interviews in the media, and memoirs and autobiographical accounts.
Steven Pinker
#18. When Goldie Hawn wrote her memoirs, no one said Goldie Hawn was snitching. When Jane Fonda wrote her memoirs, no one said Jane Fonda was snitching.
Karrine Steffans
#19. Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.
Arthur Golden
#20. The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.
Margaret Thatcher
#21. Most memoirs about alcoholism, promiscuity, and addiction are deep, sobering tales full of scars that will never heal and include alarming statistics and reflection about recovery.
This is not one of those memoirs.
Kate Madison
#22. We were developing an innovative Personal Information Manager called Chandler but a couple years ago I took off from that to do a project writing down my memoirs essentially, reminiscing about the development of the Macintosh.
Andy Hertzfeld
#23. I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.
Patrick O'Brian
#24. I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.
Erik Larson
#25. What's more, any memoirs by eyewitnesses are a treasure, no matter who the eyewitness happens to be. Don't you think so?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#26. I don't like memoirs. I think they're self-serving, and people use them to settle scores, and I really tried not to do that. You have to have a really interesting life to justify memoir, and my life has been pretty ho-hum.
Sally Mann
#27. In the worst memoirs, you can feel the author justifying himself - forgiving himself - in every paragraph. In the best memoirs, the author is tougher on him- or herself than his or her readers will ever be.
Darin Strauss
#28. I teach at Duke, and I have students who are all of twenty who want to write memoirs, and you know it's all pretty interesting stuff, but a lot of them lack gravitas, you know.
Oscar Hijuelos
#29. No innocent man buys a gun, and no happy man writes his memoirs.
Garrison Keillor
#30. Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.
Darin Strauss
#31. How do our experiences in childhood make us the adults we become? It is one of the great human questions, the theme of countless novels, biographies, and memoirs;
Paul Tough
#32. I love all insider memoirs. It doesn't matter whether it's truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialised job they have.
David Mamet
#33. When I'm dealing with the 18th century, as I do in 'The Firebird,' the difficulty isn't only finding what a woman did, it's finding her at all. Most of the sources I'm dealing with - letters and memoirs and written reports of the day - have been written by men.
Susanna Kearsley
#34. I think people dismiss celebrity memoirs as unreal, contrived and maybe partially made up. But that's definitely not true for anything that I write.
Hilary Liftin
#35. My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.
Manuel Puig
#36. 'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book.
Pat Barker
#37. The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
Clive James
#38. Memoirs are often about difficult things in a person's life. In my situation, my story starts with about the stupidest, most immoral thing I've ever done, one with terrible consequences.
Piper Kerman
#39. My father was highbrow: writing long biographies of Dante and stuff like that. Ghostwriting sportsman memoirs? That was sort of the lowest of the low.
David Lagercrantz
#40. I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it.
Mary Karr
#41. As long as Frank was well, I was happy,' he wrote in Memoirs. 'He had a gift for creating a life and, when he ceased to be alive, I couldn't create a life for myself.' And in a letter, written to Windham early in 1964: 'next to my work, Frankie was my life.
Olivia Laing
#42. People can lie in letters, but they tend not to. They certainly lie in memoirs.
Lois Lowry
#43. Do you realize how narrowly a fascist takeover in this country was headed off by Watergate? They all said as much quite frankly in all their boring memoirs. It is extremely important to keep track of these things, and remember.
William S. Burroughs
#44. At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.
James Thurber
#45. A lot of trouble has been caused by memoirs. Indiscreet revelations, that sort of thing. People who have been close as an oyster all their lives seem positively to relish causing trouble when they themselves shall be comfortably dead.
Agatha Christie
#46. History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.
Carol Tavris
#47. Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs ... may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimension, and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality.
Edwin A. Abbott
#48. I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime.
Joe Eszterhas
#50. I haven't written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life.
Sally Ride
#51. My China Diary and Walking With Lions, were memoirs of his diplomatic and political experiences. The
Shashi Tharoor
#52. A third volume of Memoirs is really a bold undertaking ... I cannot, like a certain female writer, say, I hope if I have done nothing to please, I have done nothing to offend; for truly I mean to give both pleasure and offense ...
Laetitia Pilkington
#53. I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.
Kate Zambreno
#54. I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have.
Pauline Kael
#55. In the writing of memoirs, as in the production of shows, too much caution causes the audience to nod and think of other channels.
Gerald Clarke
#56. A man who leaves memoirs, whether well or badly written, provided they be sincere, renders a service to future psychologists and writers, giving them not only a faithful picture, but likewise human documents that may be relied upon.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#57. Someday," Magnus said, looking at the crumpled royal person at his feet, "I must write my memoirs.
Cassandra Clare
#58. All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me-without my even having to read them- that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was. - about memoirs
Brock Clarke
#59. I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.
Paul Auster
#60. Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
David Ben-Gurion
#61. A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.
Homer Hickam
#62. Kissinger would probably be outraged even if he reread his own memoirs, on the grounds that they are not favorable enough.
Walter Isaacson
#63. I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.
Calvin Trillin
#64. I cut a lot of cringy sex stuff and a lot of stuff I thought was too personal. I think secret gardens are very special. I think we all have to have them. I think the secret of memoirs is keeping those parts of yourself off the page, which makes what you do share more valuable.
Damian Barr
#65. I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you.
Rosemary Mahoney
#66. The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.
Vivian Gornick
#67. You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety.
Craig Brown
#68. People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.
Anthony Powell
#69. 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
#70. Soap wasn't invented until the Romans, who also invented interesting sex. (Since my editor informs me that a gardening book is not a proper venue for discussions of interesting sex, I will go into this topic in more detail when I write my private memoirs, 'A Petunia Named Desire').
Cassandra Danz
#71. If I am to write my memoirs someday I would like to have good material to work with.
James L. Cambias
#72. Isherwood received bags of fan mail, far more than Tennessee Williams had for Memoirs. There was the sexual and jokey (a fifteen-year-old English schoolboy sent his photo and wrote on the back, "My tits are on fire").
Christopher Bram
#73. Two temptations that impair the value of their work inevitably beset public men who write memoirs. One is a tendency to reconstruct the past to suit the present views and feelings of the writer; the other is a natual desire to set his own part in affairs in a pleasing light.
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey Of Fallodon
#74. [Mark] Twain was a publisher. He published General Grant's Memoirs (a big success) and had a hand in the publishing of many of his own books. He would, I think, be very keen about the question of how a book would sell.
Hal Holbrook
#75. With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I'm fully prepared to be challenged legally on it.
Augusten Burroughs
#76. I was too busy doing my job and living my life to spend time keeping notes for some future volume of memoirs.
Pierre Trudeau
#77. My memoirs were written, and a portion of them already in the hands of the publishers, when the startling news came which has thrilled all Europe and filled her inhabitants with horror - the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.
Belle Boyd
#78. I've read my grandmother's memoirs and she served as a nurse during World War II. What they had to do was incredible.
Jessica Brown Findlay
#79. Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'
Salman Rushdie
#80. 'Memoirs of a Geisha' is everything you'd expect it to be: beautiful, mesmerizing, tasteful, Japanese. It's just not very hot.
Stephen Hunter
#81. I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.
Oscar Wilde
#82. Did you ever think about writing memoirs? You are a writer, and it may be interesting for people to read your story.
"I hate memoirs. But I am sure I will write a book about the Bowery Mission," Michael said.
Stevan V. Nikolic
#83. The memoirs I love are all very intense. If you're going to do a memoir and protect yourself, what the hell's the point? Just do fiction.
Gary Shteyngart
#84. I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#85. What George W. Bush learned in his pre-presidential years - and what he omits in his new memoirs - was not how to lead a nation, but how, with sufficient toughness, to cheat the democratic system to get elected.
Nigel Hamilton
#86. I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off.
Jerry B. Jenkins
#88. I've been approached many times to write all sorts of books about my past and my personal life. I get interest from people who want to do reality shows, and somebody just offered me a huge amount of money to write my spiritual memoirs. I'm just not interested.
Steve Vai
#90. Speaking professionally, it was admirably done."
-John H. Watson-
-The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes-
Arthur Conan Doyle
#91. 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
#92. Memoirs lie, but fiction tells the truth.
Philip Roth
#93. 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
#94. I'm very detail oriented. I think that's why people enjoy my memoirs - because I tend to remember everything.
Jen Lancaster
#95. 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
#96. It's no secret that most memoirs are really self-help books in disguise.
Nathan Hill
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
