Quotes & Sayings About Writing Memoirs

The story of what it means to be human is never complete. Every generation will produce its own share of comedies and tragedies, fools and geniuses. What the Greeks started the rest of the world will continue to build upon. The old stories will continue to explicate where we came from, while the new stories will illuminate in what direction humankind trends. The collection of future stories of humanity will add to the cumulative library of stories that past writers told, an anthology of collaborative stories will shed light upon the singleness of the human spirit in its aspirations, powers, vicissitudes, and wisdom. — Kilroy J. Oldster

They were twenty-seven already, in no time at all they'd be thirty, terrifying. No one knew what would happen then. Michelle couldn't imagine anything more than writing zine-ish memoirs and working in bookstores. — Michelle Tea

We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory. — Eugene Ionesco

Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in mid-sentence. You simply need to figure out where each one starts and ends. — Ashly Lorenzana

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

There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism. — Raymond Chandler

Interest in reading memoirs is universal. What has happened is that people are writing about more and more outrageous things. Our threshold for weirdness - you can't have just a normal childhood - has gone way up. — Sara Nelson

Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I've been able to use my life as a lesson. — Jane Fonda

The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11. — Matt Gallagher

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Early retirement, Dalton. Teach yourself to type with your toes and you
can start writing your memoirs. — Mark Allen Smith

Stalin didn't write any memoirs. He was too secretive. He was afraid people might read them. — Jonathan Lynn

You don't propose marriage after one date. You don't decide on a career after one article or class session. You don't cast your vote based on one opinion of the candidate in question. Stories, essays, novels, and memoirs all deserve to be, indeed have to be read multiple times. Every writer worth his or her salt knows that writing is rewriting. Every reader should know the same thing about understanding text: that is, real reading is rereading. — Dave Eggers

From the cover blurb on the University of Wisconsin Press edition, writer unknown:

Discussing memoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays, and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical discourse. Responding to the recent growth of illness and disability narratives in the United States.... — G. Thomas Couser

Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town - still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done. — Anne Lamott

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

Whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age-too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs. — John F. Kennedy

As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

To me, fiction writing at any length, in any form, is a feat of radical compression: take the sprawling chaos of human experience, run it through the sieve of perception, and distill it into something comparatively miniscule that somehow, miraculously, illuminates the vast complexity around it. I don't think about short stories any differently than I do about novels or novellas or even memoirs. But the smaller scale of a story is important; the distillation must be even more extreme in order to succeed. It also must be purer; there is almost no room for mistakes. — Jennifer Egan

Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution. — Marco Roth

I bet when Winston Churchill was writing his memoirs he didn't keep getting interrupted by two blokes bawling that the ties they took off the night before had mysteriously disappeared, and demanding I find them, seeing as I was the one last seen tied up with them. — Gillibran Brown

I could never write my memoirs, just because too many people are still alive and would be hurt. — Bruce Willis

I think people dismiss celebrity memoirs as unreal, contrived and maybe partially made up. But that's definitely not true for anything that I write. — Hilary Liftin

The teachers introduced a program that explicitly trained the students to construct coherent arguments, with a focus on the connections between successive ideas. It was a radical shift from the kind of assignment that dominates high school writing instruction today, in which students are asked to write memoirs and personal reflections. The students showed dramatic improvements in their test scores in several subjects, and many more of them graduated from high school and applied to college. It's no coincidence that — Steven Pinker

Unless you bring a beating heart into your message, it is dead' (Author unknown)

That's why I wrote my how-to book, "Don't Write your MEmoir without ME". If there's no "this is me" in your memoir, it won't resonate with your readers the way you hope it will. — Viga Boland

Death, death. Now I won't be able to write my beautiful memoirs. — Joachim Von Ribbentrop

My father was highbrow: writing long biographies of Dante and stuff like that. Ghostwriting sportsman memoirs? That was sort of the lowest of the low. — David Lagercrantz

Human souls enfold the elemental elements that we configure to provide our own distinctive explanation of what it means to be alive. By opening our hearts and minds, by engaging in intuitive self-exploration, by telling our life stories full of prejudices and mindboggling idiosyncrasies, and by listening to the multivariate stories of our brethren, we add a ray of light to the spiraling consciousness of humankind. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It's easy to write one's memoirs when one has a terrible memory. — Arthur Schnitzler

I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off. — Jerry B. Jenkins

Did you ever think about writing memoirs? You are a writer, and it may be interesting for people to read your story.
"I hate memoirs. But I am sure I will write a book about the Bowery Mission," Michael said. — Stevan V. Nikolic

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can't drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs. — Andre Dubus III

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs; Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay; Jane Taylor McDonnell, Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; and William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. — Vivian Gornick

I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have. — Pauline Kael

I live my memoirs, I don't have to write them down. — Karl Lagerfeld

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

I don't read memoirs. But if you write a memoir, I would think you'd want people to know, "O.K., look, I've taken some liberties here." It's just a matter of being open with your readers. — Augusten Burroughs

The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person's personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person's sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author's own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Two temptations that impair the value of their work inevitably beset public men who write memoirs. One is a tendency to reconstruct the past to suit the present views and feelings of the writer; the other is a natual desire to set his own part in affairs in a pleasing light. — Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey Of Fallodon

Memoirs have at their heart a content that "happened" to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face? — Lidia Yuknavitch

What draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way. — Lisa Cron

Ultimately, whether we are writing posts, paragraphs, essays, arguments, memoirs, monographs or even just the Great American Tweet, writing is and should be a grand adventure. — Constance Hale

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

Nothing detains the reader's attention more powerfully than deep involutions of distress, or sudden vicissitudes of fortune; and these might be abundantly afforded by memoirs of the sons of literature. They are entangled by contracts which they know not how to fulfill, and obliged to write on subjects which they do not understand. Every publication is a new period of time, from which some increase or declension of fame is to be reckoned. The gradations of a hero's life are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book. — Samuel Johnson

You can't just come out and say what you have to say. That's what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New York, spills peanuts all over the place (back when the cheapskate airlines at least gave you peanuts), and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That's because of the way he's telling his story. You need a good way to tell your story. — Adair Lara

So, Mr. Nick,' murmured the valet, applying shaving soap to his employer's face with an ivory-handled brush, 'are you writing a book?'
Damn him, thought Lerner. He knows I detest conversation with a razor at my throat.
'My memoirs,' he muttered. 'A few jottings only. Waiting to die is such a bore, I write to pass the time.' ("The Overseer") — Albert E. Cowdrey

Listen, in England people are already writing their memoirs at the age of 23. — Rupert Everett

We were developing an innovative Personal Information Manager called Chandler but a couple years ago I took off from that to do a project writing down my memoirs essentially, reminiscing about the development of the Macintosh. — Andy Hertzfeld

What's the haps, Alli? Writing your memoirs?"
"People who write memoirs should die. — Santino Hassell

One of the ways to discover our toughness and resiliency is to look back at where we come from. (from Amazon description) — Jeannette Walls

In the writing of memoirs, as in the production of shows, too much caution causes the audience to nod and think of other channels. — Gerald Clarke

When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency. — Alix Kates Shulman

If you don't write your memoirs down then time will swallow them up, leaving no leftovers. — Sahara Sanders

I rent a Jacobean-fronted hunting lodge in Hampshire from the National Trust and like to go there as much as possible. I've grown to love it so much, especially when writing my memoirs there at weekends. — Nicholas Haslam

My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs. — Manuel Puig

Buonaparte is certainly writing, or rather dictating, his memoirs. He walks backwards and forwards with his hands behind him, and dictates so fast that two or three of his suite are obliged to be in attendance, that the one may take down one-half of a sentence, and another the rest; they then literally compare notes, and put the disjointed legs and wings and heads of periods together. This is writing a book as he fought a battle. — Mary Russell Mitford

No innocent man buys a gun, and no happy man writes his memoirs. — Garrison Keillor

Sometimes, I'll craft a scene that's so poignant; on the last keystroke I'll raise my hands high overhead and scream "Yes!" at the top of my lungs. I have yet to experience an orgasm so powerful and fulfilling. — Max Hawthorne

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate. — Mark Leyner

All the authors who've ultimately published Louder Than Words memoirs have been very happy to be chosen and excited about the possibility of having their memoir published. Even though these books deal with serious, often painful, issues, in all cases the authors felt as though writing their story would be an empowering and healing experience. — Deborah Reber

Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the President. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin. — David Letterman