Memoir Quotes - Page 3

• Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Heart, Mean, Gossip

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• 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.

  David Leavitt

  Memories, Thinking, Degrees

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• I don't feel any ethical dilemma when I write. In my memoir, I was able to write with candor about the two most difficult people in the world to write with candor about - mom and dad. Everything else is downhill from there.

  Said Sayrafiezadeh

  Mom, Dad, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter?

  Lauren Slater

  Doe, Fiction, Half

  Lauren Slater (2000). “Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir”, Random House Incorporated

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• I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring.

  Harlan Coben

  Writing, Would Be, Boring

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• If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.

  Dani Shapiro

  Hurt, Writing, Creative

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• I think the act of lying can be separated from the genre of memoir. Though often times, people are unaware of their own subjectivity.

  Rob Roberge

  Lying, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I'm making a kind of a memoir of certain aspects and times in my life. Now that I'm older I can look back and analyze some things, and see the root of things.

  Lourdes Portillo

  Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument; they were also her chance for monumental revisionism.

  Karen Abbott

  Rose, Musical, Chance

  Source: tech.blorge.com

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• When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.

  Julia Cameron

  Book, Home, Writing

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• A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.

  Homer Hickam

  Writing, Way, Easy

  Source: interviewingauthors.com

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• I believe a good memoir should have all of the narrative elements of a novel: character development, dialogue, descriptive language, and metaphor.

  Danielle Trussoni

  Believe, Character, Should Have

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

  Isabel Allende

  Memories, Lying, Writing

  Interview with Jordan E. Rosenfeld, www.writersdigest.com. August 27, 2008.

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• I'm writing this memoir from the perspective of somebody who's prosperous and has means. Having said that, one of the things that I think I discovered about those additional years is that I don't think they really are added to the end of life.

  Anna Quindlen

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I have studied the enemy all my life. I have read the memoirs of his generals and his leaders. I have even read his philosophers and listened to his music. I have studied in detail the account of every damned one of his battles. I know exactly how he will react under any given set of circumstances. And he hasn't the slightest idea of what I'm going to do. So when the time comes, I'm going to whip the hell out of him.

  George S. Patton

  Life, Ideas, Leader

  War As I Knew It (1947).

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• Working with somebody who has a more interesting life than I do - and getting to take on that life temporarily - is an endlessly interesting way to have the experience of writing memoir.

  Hilary Liftin

  Writing, Interesting, Way

  "'Getting to Take on That Life Temporarily'". Interview with Kathryn Borel, Jr., logger.believermag.com. July 21, 2015.

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• At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

  James Thurber

  Flower, Writing, Leaving

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.149, Library of America

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• My children haven't read 'Winter Journal'. They have read some of my work, but I really don't foist it on them. I want them to be free to discover it in their own good time. I think reading an intimate memoir by your father - or an intimate autobiographical work, whatever we want to call this thing - you have to come at it at the right moment, so I'm certainly not foisting it upon them.

  Paul Auster

  Children, Father, Reading

  Source: www.timeout.com

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• Now that Mr. Carter has made a book of his diary, an adoring memoir entitled Keeping Faith, the notes read like a collection of letters sent from scout camp.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Book, Diaries, Letters

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• And it's kind of my own fault too, in the sense that I've used my own life as a literary device so much. I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. I find that most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Noel Murray, www.avclub.com. November 15, 2006.

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• As a blogger, Chez Pazienza is filled with outrage, passion and insight -- delivered with a distinctive point of view, a wicked sense of humor, and a two-fisted style of prose. In Dead Star Twilight, he turns all these on himself -- and produces a fierce, funny, disturbing, but ultimately uplifting memoir. This is the book A Million Little Pieces dreamed of being.

  Arianna Huffington

  Uplifting, Stars, Book

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• The East is unfamiliar with those confessions, memoirs, and autobiographies so beloved in the West. There is a clear difference in tonality. One's gaze never lingers on the suffering humanity of Christ, but penetrates behind the kenotic veil. To the West's mysticism of the Cross and its veneration of the Sacred Heart corresponds the eastern mysticism of the sealed tomb, from which eternal life eternal wells up.

  Paul Evdokimov

  Heart, Differences, Humanity

  "Orthodoxy". Book by Paul Evdokimov, 1968.

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• 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.

  Laetitia Pilkington

  Mean, Giving, Female Writers

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• I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.

  Vivian Gornick

  Writing, Fiction, Stories

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• If you're going to do a memoir, then it's sort of at this age - in your late sixties or seventies - that you do it. I don't understand people who do memoirs when they're 20. I think most people need a little more time than 20 years to become the person they are. In fact, that process of becoming who you are is still ongoing when you get older, where you go, "Let's see where my next 10 years is going to take me." S

  Grace Coddington

  Thinking, Years, Becoming Who You Are

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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