Memoir Quotes - Page 17

• The contemporary memoir is playing an important role in at least just bringing certain relationships out into the open in American society, and also it's a place where the novel of development, the novel of consciousness, has gone.

  Marco Roth

  Important, Roles, Gone

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I couldn't have articulated this process at the time; I just sort of did it instinctually. But now when I talk about this with my students all the time, it's one of the first things I address in memoir classes - that you have to put it all in because you're writing your way into the ending of your own story. Even if you think you know what the story is, you don't until you write it. If you start leaving things out you could leave out vital organs and not know it.

  Melissa Febos

  Writing, Thinking, Class

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The other reason I didn't want to fictionalize it is because one of the main points of publishing a memoir in nonfiction was that I wanted to write about what had been a very lonely experience. The books that most saved my life as a kid were the ones that articulated lonely experiences that I had thought were mine alone.

  Melissa Febos

  Lonely, Book, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.

  Elliott Colla

  Iraq, Looks, Stories

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Drawing, People

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• A lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving.

  William J. Clinton

  Hope, Self, Interesting

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• I think the secret of memoirs is keeping those parts of yourself off the page, which makes what you do share more valuable.

  Damian Barr

  Thinking, Secret, Share

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm surprised how often I'm asked about being a man with a woman narrator. I'm not the first, nor will I be the last. It's been done forever, but we seem to forget that. The whole notion of "write what you know" is not just boring, but wrong. Lately it seems like every novel has to be a memoir. I'm a boring person, but I'm a writer with a relatively vivid imagination. And when people ask me about how I find the voice of a woman, I tell them that my life is run by women.

  Rabih Alameddine

  Running, Writing, Men

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  Junot Diaz

  Real, Fiction, Done

  "Junot Díaz: a life in books". Interview with Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. August 31, 2012.

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• I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Father, Holiday, Two Sides

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• 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.

  Mitch Albom

  Writing, Interesting, Mind

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• When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.

  Conor Oberst

  Song, Writing, Goal

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• The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  War, Ducks, Guarantees

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• I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.

  John Major

  Writing, Long, Long Time

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• The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

  Mary Karr

  Character, Emotional, Giving

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• If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own.

  Judith Barrington

  Fall, Teaching, Writing

  Judith Barrington (2002). “Writing the Memoir”

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• My Family and Other Saints echoes Gerald Durrell's classic memoir, My Family and Other Animals, not only in its title, but in its wonderful humor and lyrical prose. Like Durrell, Kirin Narayan takes the reader to a fascinating world far from our own, and brings to life its myriad sights, sounds and smells, while revealing the profound cultural beliefs of its people. India is just the most complex character among a cast of characters-family members, gurus, hippies, and neighbors-all of whom I now count as old friends.

  Judith Barrington

  Hippie, Character, Animal

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• We hear from sex workers who have through their own volition become media figures, or have despite their own wishes become media figures. Like Ashley Dupré, who has a sex advice column in the New York Post. You get outed and then people expect you to write a memoir because they think, what else are you going to do with your life?

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.

  Alexei Sayle

  People, Want, Knows

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

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• I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.

  Koren Zailckas

  Writing, Feelings, Ambitious

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• The only good grades I ever got in school before I was kicked out were for creative writing. I thought that fiction might be in my future but then my career took a different path once the Beatles showed me what a blast being in a band could be. Writing my memoir Late, Late at Night reminded me how much I love the craft. So I decided to give fiction a shot again.Magnificent Vibration is the result. I’m still not quite sure where it came from, but once I got going, it practically wrote itself. I’ve heard writers I admire speak of that phenomenon, so maybe I’m on the right track.

  Rick Springfield

  Writing, School, Night

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• When we spoke, Gene Wilder had just written a memoir called "Kiss Me Like A Stranger." The title was suggested by his late wife Gilda Radner three weeks before she died in 1989.

  Terry Gross

  Kissing, Wife, Titles

  Source: keranews.org

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• Whatever shall we do in that remote spot? Well, we will write our memoirs. Work is the scythe of time.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Time, Writing, Army

  Napoleon Bonaparte (2010). “The Corsican: The Virtual Diary of Napoleon Bonaparte”, p.370, Fireship Press

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• If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not--if this very thought fills you with regret--then what are you waiting for?

  Anne Lamott

  Regret, Writing, Heart

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• Someday," Magnus said, looking at the crumpled royal person at his feet, "I must write my memoirs.

  Cassandra Clare

  Writing, Feet, Royal

  Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson (2015). “The Bane Chronicles”, p.89, Simon and Schuster

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