Top 44 Quotes On Writing Memoirs
#1. As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.
Vivian Gornick
#6. If you don't write your memoirs down then time will swallow them up, leaving no leftovers.
Sahara Sanders
#7. Stalin didn't write any memoirs. He was too secretive. He was afraid people might read them.
Jonathan Lynn
#8. I live my memoirs, I don't have to write them down.
Karl Lagerfeld
#9. We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.
Eugene Ionesco
#10. When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.
Alix Kates Shulman
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have.
Pauline Kael
#17. One of the ways to discover our toughness and resiliency is to look back at where we come from. (from Amazon description)
Jeannette Walls
#18. 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
#19. My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.
Manuel Puig
#20. 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
#21. No innocent man buys a gun, and no happy man writes his memoirs.
Garrison Keillor
#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. Listen, in England people are already writing their memoirs at the age of 23.
Rupert Everett
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. I could never write my memoirs, just because too many people are still alive and would be hurt.
Bruce Willis
#30. It's easy to write one's memoirs when one has a terrible memory.
Arthur Schnitzler
#31. 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
#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. 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
#34. 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
#35. Interest in reading memoirs is universal. What has happened is that people are writing about more and more outrageous things. Our threshold for weirdness - you can't have just a normal childhood - has gone way up.
Sara Nelson
#36. Early retirement, Dalton. Teach yourself to type with your toes and you
can start writing your memoirs.
Mark Allen Smith
#37. Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I've been able to use my life as a lesson.
Jane Fonda
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. What's the haps, Alli? Writing your memoirs?"
"People who write memoirs should die.
Santino Hassell
#42. Whatever shall we do in that remote spot? Well, we will write our memoirs. Work is the scythe of time.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#43. Ultimately, whether we are writing posts, paragraphs, essays, arguments, memoirs, monographs or even just the Great American Tweet, writing is and should be a grand adventure.
Constance Hale
#44. 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
