Memoir Quotes

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.

Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.

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

I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. It's easier to get to the truth by not claiming that you are speaking it. Some things can be said in fiction that can never be said in memoir.

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.

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

A memoir should have some uplifting quality, inspiring or illuminating, and that's what separates a life story that can influence other people.

My book 'Trust Your Heart', which is the story of my life, will be followed by 'Singing Lessons', a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.

I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.

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.

I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you're going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens.

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

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.

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

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.

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.

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.

Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

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.

Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

I'm a layperson. I barely got out of high school. I have no business telling people what to do or my big philosophy on life. I'm certainly not going to write any sort of memoir.