Memoir Quotes - Page 2

• Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction.

  William Zinsser

  Events, Looks, Calling

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• Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

  David Ben-Gurion

  Change, Believe, Writing

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• The past is never dead. It's not even past.

  William Faulkner

  Wisdom, Past, Heredity And Environment

  Requiem for a Nun act 1 (1951)

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• History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.

  Carol Tavris

  Writing, Victim, Written

  Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson (2008). “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts”, p.253, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.

  Clive James

  Saws, Julius, Versions

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• I keep thinking my father gave me Turgenev, and then I realize at some point, Oh, this is a false memory. I mean, that's one of the things that interests me about memoir. It should be as much about how we remember, and that includes false memories, and the realization that one is having a false memory. That's the kind of an interesting way of layering the whole experience of recollection.

  Marco Roth

  Memories, Father, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

  Shirley Jackson

  Children, Savages, Disrespectful

  Shirley Jackson (2008). “The Lottery”, p.29, The Creative Company

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• Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.

  James Frey

  Writing, Thinking, People

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• 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

  Writing, Cutting, Editing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think that today's books, in which every quote, every conversation, is taken from a memoir, an autobiography, an interview, or what-have-you, are much more convincing.

  Russell Freedman

  Book, Taken, Thinking

  Source: www.hbook.com

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• She had all the best things wrong with her—incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She’s so lucky.

  Peter Cameron

  Names, Perfect, Addiction

  Peter Cameron (2009). “Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel”, p.149, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

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• In the olden days, a memoir was something written by Churchill and people like that, because they had a grand experience and considered it useful for future generations. And then it became what it became - a public purging in which other people have the chance to judge you and then forgive you, perhaps learning something from your sorry example.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Sorry, People, Judging

  "There Is No Real Life". Interview with Brad Fox, www.guernicamag.com. March 15, 2013.

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• 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

  Lying, Writing, Epic

  Interview with Joelle Fraser, ir.uiowa.edu. 2000.

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• I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.

  Tim O'Brien

  Writing, Hands, Trying

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• 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.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Art, Attitude, Tired

  Source: therumpus.net

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• A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

  Richard Hell

  Giving, Thread, Incidents

  "Q&A: Richard Hell Has Gone to Heaven". Interview with Scott Martelle, www.esquire.com. March 8, 2013.

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• What are you going to do with astronauts who first reach the surface of Mars and then turn around and rocket back home-ward? What are they going to do, write their memoirs? Would they go again? Having them repeat the voyage, in my view, is dim-witted. Why don't they stay there on Mars?

  Buzz Aldrin

  Home, Writing, Views

  Buzz Aldrin, Leonard David (2013). “Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration”, p.167, National Geographic Books

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• But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

  Said Sayrafiezadeh

  Real, Writing, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The most obvious difference between writing novels and memoirs is that my memoirs are true stories, and explore certain experiences I've lived, and thus operate within the boundaries of memory and fact.

  Danielle Trussoni

  Memories, Writing, Differences

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Memoir is a unique opportunity to revisit yourself. I don't mean by memory. I mean in the revision process. You don't just write a chapter and that's it. You must constantly return to it. You must dote on it. And even if it's saying something ugly about who you are, you have to find the poetry in it. You have to find the poetry in yourself.

  Joshua Mohr

  Memories, Writing, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I believe that the memoir is the novel of the 21st century; it’s an amazing form that we haven’t even begun to tap…we’re just getting started figuring out what the rules are.

  Susan Cheever

  Believe, Century, Form

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• But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still living my memoirs.

  Rebecca Wells

  Writing, Stills

  Rebecca Wells (2004). “Divine secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: a novel”

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• 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

  Writing, People, Interesting

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 3, 2009.

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• I think that's the thing that memoir can do more than anything it does; it testifies and bears witness to the existence of people whose lives, pleasures and virtues would never have been testified to without my having done it. That makes me really glad.

  Richard Ford

  Thinking, People, Done

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• This week Sarah Palin's memoir became a bestseller. It's not even out yet. It's being translated into English.

  Bill Maher

  Week, Palin

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