Writing A Memoir Quotes

#1. The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.

Donald Miller

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.

Caitlin Doughty

#8. Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

Bill Ayers

#9. 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

#10. Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

Steve Bisley

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.

Mitch Albom

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Being a maverick traveller, one would like to place oneself in the place of a local; just listen without judgement.

Mary Jane Walker

#21. 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

#22. Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

Stephen King

#23. 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

#24. Pain engraves a deeper memory.

Anne Sexton

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. My professional life had started and here I was at a professional dinner full of uninhibited drinking.

Gerry Abbey

#30. 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

#31. The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die
maybe.

Steve Earle

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. Charles Blow's memoir 'Fire Shut Up in My Bones' was a breathtaking piece of writing.

Andrew Rosenthal

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.

Gillian Marchenko

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. An intensely gripping narrative ... expertly crafted and totally addictive ... a must read!

Maggie Reese

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. It is not a crime to commit First Degree Writing

Temple Emmet Williams

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. Expectation is the dirtiest word in a traveler's vocabulary.

John Early

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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