Memoir Quotes

• 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

  Memories, Done, Good Things

  Will Rogers (1982). “More letters of a self-made diplomat”, Oklahoma State University Press

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• 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

  Jobs, Thinking, Doctors

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• I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.

  Gloria Swanson

  Book, Divorce, Given

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, People, Imagination

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• There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs

  Will Rogers

  Country, Home, Biographies

  Will Rogers, Bryan B. Sterling, Frances N. Sterling (1993). “Will Rogers' World: America's Foremost Political Humorist Comments on the Twenties and Thirties--and Eighties and Nineties”, p.46, Rowman & Littlefield

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• 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

  Writing, Impact, Stronger

  "Conversation with Isabel Allende". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.feminist.com.

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• 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

  Writing, Voice, Challenges

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• It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were.

  Neil Simon

  Writing, Dark, Giving

  Interview with Charles Flowers, bookpage.com. October 1999.

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• True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

  Patricia Hampl

  Self, Literature, World

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• Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.

  Virginia Woolf

  Mean, Events, Littles

  Virginia Woolf, Jeanne Schulkind (1976). “Moments of being: unpublished autobiographical writings”, Sussex University Press

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• 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

  Writing, Life Is, Drag

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• By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes.

  Caroline Knapp

  Self, Order, Narrators

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• A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

  Vivian Gornick

  Life, Truth, Believe

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• 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

  Memories, People, Done

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.341, University of Chicago Press

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• Oh, my God. What if you wake up some day, and you're 65 or 75, and you never got your novel or memoir written; or you didn't go swimming in warm pools or oceans because your thighs were jiggly or you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen.

  Anne Lamott

  Nice, Ocean, Kids

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• 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.

  Isabel Allende

  Writing, Exercise, Mirrors

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• Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

  Mary Karr

  Memories, Literature

  "The Liars' Club: A Memoir". Book by Mary Karr, 1995.

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• To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

  William Zinsser

  Art, Writing, Editors

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• Let no family go into eternity without having left their memoirs for their children, their grandchildren, and their posterity.

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Children, Eternity, Left

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• It's an ethical pact I've made with myself and with the reader - not to invent. And when I can't remember, I say I can't remember. I'm just appalled by the memoirs published by people who regurgitate dialogue, conversations from when they were small children, and they go on for three or four pages. I can't even remember what we said to each other ten minutes ago! How can I remember what was said sixty years ago? It's not possible.

  Paul Auster

  Children, Years, People

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• Memoirs are the backstairs of history.

  George Meredith

  History, Biographies

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• 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

  Oysters, People, Trouble

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• I could have written a misery memoir and instead I tried to make it funny. I never complained.

  Caitlin Moran

  Misery, Written

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

  Akhil Sharma

  Nonfiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Moments fly, memories remain; and then memories fly, only memoirs remain and finally memoirs disappear, nothing remains!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Memories, Moments, Disappear

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