Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Memoir. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Memoir Quotes And Sayings by 88 Authors including Calvin Trillin,Armistead Maupin,Chloe Thurlow,Melissa Febos,Patricia Hampl for you to enjoy and share.
I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.
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.
Autobiography is a precious broken vase pieced painstakingly together still showing the chips and cracks. It is a broken truth revealing snapshots of a cracked and chipped life pieced pieced painstakingly together.
The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in - or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things.
The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.
Everyone has a captivity narrative; today we call it memoir.
There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs
Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.
Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction.
I'm not sure I ever would write a memoir.
I get kind of tired of the "But it's your life!" attitude about memoir. I wrote. I engaged in artistic production. I made a piece of art. Why the preciousness or mystical unicorns around "memoir"? I'm curious how you feel about it just now.
A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.
As a publisher and author, I'm a big fan of historical fiction and also memoir.
And there's nothing more dangerous than a written memoir.
Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
I don't think anybody would be interested in my memoir - and my memory isn't very good either!
I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons.
I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.
Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.
I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.
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.
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.
Memoirists collect experiences in an attempt to capture the fluttery thing we call life.
---from Blog-"Readers, Writers and Pumpkin Pie
I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.
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.
The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.
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.
But who has time to write memoirs? I'm still living my memoirs.
Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.
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.
Autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.
I can't help thinking about memoir as a down-and-up process: Dive down for color; come up for context. Sink back down for action; climb back up for self-awareness and gratitude.
The successful memoirist [blogger] respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to lie or embellish, but knows that truth is both different from facts and greater than facts, and not always their sum.
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.
Autobiography is a wound where the blood of history does not dry.
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.
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.
Autobiography is mostly alibiography.
This memoir is one of the most brutally honest books I've ever read. You will grow to believe, and cheer on, this flawed hero as he gains a liberating knowledge of himself.
There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies
Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.
If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.
No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.
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.
Memoirs are noting more than literary masterbation.
It's no secret that most memoirs are really self-help books in disguise.
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.
When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.
Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form.
A memoir should have some uplifting quality, inspiring or illuminating, and that's what separates a life story that can influence other people.
The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.
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.
If you bill something as a memoir, you're implying that everything in it is true.
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).
For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.
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.
Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what's interesting to you isn't necessarily interesting to a reader.
Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it's purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it's going to fail.
I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don't ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
An autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.
Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.
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.
There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.
Writers of memoir are storytellers, and the point of a personal story is to make a truth that resonates for you, that closes the experience around a narrative and brings it to completion.
In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.
My books are my confessions.
Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, "I really want to have sex, where do I start?" What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another.
A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.
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.
You read so much about the healing power of memoir, but you don't read about the wounding power it has first. The recollection of past events is not, in and of itself, therapeutic.
What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.
Memoirs lie, but fiction tells the truth.
As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.
All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
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 ...
An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.
The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.
People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.
I'm a layperson. I barely got out of high school. I have no business telling people what to do or my big philosophy on life. I'm certainly not going to write any sort of memoir.
A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession.
I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.
Just as there can be a hole in these narratives, a memoir can be as much about what's forgotten as what's remembered.
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
This book is a personal memoir; but it is also a larger story-about carelessness and guilt, and the wreckage they can make of lives.
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.
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.
The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.
Fiction is a web of lies that attempts to entangle the truth. And autobiography may well be the reverse: data tricked up and rearranged to invent a fictive self.
I've yet to read a memoir by anyone I've known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
I think the act of lying can be separated from the genre of memoir. Though often times, people are unaware of their own subjectivity.
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.
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.
After all, memoirs are not open doors into another person's house. They are more like broken windows, with the owner trying to explain away all of the damage.
An autobiography is a life story. It starts when you're born and continues until the end.
By calling it a memoir, I meant is as a collection of memories. I thought it was (a more) artful (title) than documentary.
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.