Memoir Quotes - Page 10

• The parts in which I elaborated on the sexual life of the doctor herself, the personal life, her relation with men [in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor]. All this. They left only some very, very minute parts. And also the political, the political element in it. So in a way, they cut pieces that to my mind were very important.

  Nawal El Saadawi

  Cutting, Men, Doctors

  Source: muse.jhu.edu

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• During the '80s I wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison. This is one of my most important books. It came out in Arabic in '83. About my experience in prison.

  Nawal El Saadawi

  Book, Important, Prison

  Source: muse.jhu.edu

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• You know, people talk about [Richard] Nixon's "madman theory." We don't really know much about that. It was in memoirs, by somebody else.

  Noam Chomsky

  People, Theory, Madmen

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.

  Danielle Trussoni

  Character, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I never wanted/expected to write a memoir, but this life thing, it has a way of sideswiping our worlds, scaring us so thoroughly that our past lenses of contextualizing events don't work - they cease to matter.

  Joshua Mohr

  Writing, Past, Our World

  Source: therumpus.net

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• One of the things I write about a bit in my Madam Secretary memoir is on Rwanda, where I was an instructed ambassador at the U.N., and my instructions were to not vote for increased forces there, and I didn't like my instructions. So I got up and called Washington and said, "Change my instructions," and they didn't.

  Madeleine Albright

  Writing, Ambassadors, Vote

  Source: www.chicagomaroon.com

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• Andrée De Jongh story led me to other stories of women who joined the Resistance in France. I found literally dozens of memoirs written by women who had become spies and couriers and helped to create the escape network. These women were like action-star heroes.

  Megan Chance

  Stars, Hero, Spy

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• [Madness] happened so frequently. I think what I was most maddest about - and it's in the book [Speaking Freely: A Memoir] - when the House and the Senate, back in 1984, were debating a bill that would - at least delay and maybe stop some of the ex - summary execution of disabled children - infants. And the Down syndrome kids and other kids had been, in some cases, routinely let die, to use the euphemism.

  Nat Hentoff

  Children, Book, Kids

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

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• I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Book, Writing, Character

  "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

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• To be honest, I don't know. I started one [book] back in 1982 or '83 when I first retired. But I was only 25 or 26 and not ready to write my memoirs.

  Sugar Ray Leonard

  Book, Writing, Firsts

  Source: aalbc.com

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• If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I believe someone will pay you to write it. And you will get a contract for nonfiction. And if it is about victimology in one way or another than you'll get more money. It's a sensation.

  Frederick Busch

  Believe, Writing, Eighteen Years Old

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• Bob Dylan wrote in his elliptical memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, he was washed up in the 1980s, no longer a commercial success, and no longer putting out good work.

  Bob Dylan

  Bob, Good Work, Volume

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Doe, Body, Female

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Ambition, Track, Decision

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  California, Desire, Asia

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• I was astonished to find that the positions my grandfather had defended were now overgrown and entangled with trees and thorns. I suppose I had developed a sense of reverence for the locations he described in his memoirs and letters - the forts and the high emplacements. I had expected them to have been preserved in some way.

  Chris Cleave

  Tree, Grandfather, Location

  "'We Don't Know Our Hearts Until Life Puts Us to the Test'--Chris Cleave on 'Everyone Brave Is Forgiven'". Interview With Erin Kodicek, www.amazonbookreview.com. May 31, 2016.

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• I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.

  Alice Mattison

  Writing, Pieces, Nonfiction

  Source: therumpus.net

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• [Barack] Obama isn't pointing to anyone, and certainly doesn't like it when others note (correctly) that his influences were the likes of Saul Alinsky, the Chicagoan and modern founder of community organizing, or Frank Marshall Davis, the communist journalist and agitator from Chicago who mentored Obama in Hawaii in the latter 1970s, and who Obama warmly acknowledges in his memoirs.

  Paul Kengor

  Community, Chicago, Hawaii

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

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• My memoirs are full of humor, I had to change jokes because it was a little too dark.

  Marina Abramovic

  Dark, Littles, Jokes

  Source: www.marieclaire.com

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• Memoirs need confusion. It's the thing every human has in common. We are magnificently confused.

  Joshua Mohr

  Confused, Confusion, Needs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The Adderall Diaries is phenomenal. With jittery finesse and a reformed tweaker's eye for detail, Stephen Elliott captures the terrifying, hilarious, heart-strangling reality of a life whose scorched-earth physical and psycho-emotional dimensions no one could have invented - they absolutely had to be lived. By all rights, the author should either be dead or chewing his fingers in a bus station. Instead, he may well have written the memoir of an entire generation.

  Jerry Stahl

  Heart, Eye, Reality

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

  Steve Earle

  Writing, Thinking, Stupidest

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• With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

  David Halberstam

  Book, Marketing, Television

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• The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in.

  Arthur Koestler

  Men, Thinking, Ideas

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• Much more than memoir; it's history.

  Russell Banks

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