Memoir Quotes

• When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that's Memoirs.

  Will Rogers

  Memories, Done, Good Things

  Will Rogers (1982). “More letters of a self-made diplomat”, Oklahoma State University Press

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• I love all insider memoirs. It doesn't matter whether it's truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialised job they have.

  David Mamet

  Jobs, Thinking, Doctors

  55 Copy quote

• I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.

  Gloria Swanson

  Book, Divorce, Given

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

  54 Copy quote

  Show source

• People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, People, Imagination

  53 Copy quote

• There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs

  Will Rogers

  Country, Home, Biographies

  Will Rogers, Bryan B. Sterling, Frances N. Sterling (1993). “Will Rogers' World: America's Foremost Political Humorist Comments on the Twenties and Thirties--and Eighties and Nineties”, p.46, Rowman & Littlefield

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.

  Isabel Allende

  Writing, Impact, Stronger

  "Conversation with Isabel Allende". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.feminist.com.

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were.

  Neil Simon

  Writing, Dark, Giving

  Interview with Charles Flowers, bookpage.com. October 1999.

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

  Patricia Hampl

  Self, Literature, World

  7 Copy quote

• Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.

  Virginia Woolf

  Mean, Events, Littles

  Virginia Woolf, Jeanne Schulkind (1976). “Moments of being: unpublished autobiographical writings”, Sussex University Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

  Vivian Gornick

  Life, Truth, Believe

  50 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Life Is, Drag

  13 Copy quote

• Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

  Mary Karr

  Memories, Literature

  "The Liars' Club: A Memoir". Book by Mary Karr, 1995.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

  William Zinsser

  Art, Writing, Editors

  3 Copy quote

• A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons.

  Isabel Allende

  Writing, Exercise, Mirrors

  3 Copy quote

• Oh, my God. What if you wake up some day, and you're 65 or 75, and you never got your novel or memoir written; or you didn't go swimming in warm pools or oceans because your thighs were jiggly or you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen.

  Anne Lamott

  Nice, Ocean, Kids

  316 Copy quote

• Let no family go into eternity without having left their memoirs for their children, their grandchildren, and their posterity.

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Children, Eternity, Left

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  3 Copy quote

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

  William Faulkner

  Wisdom, Past, Heredity And Environment

  Requiem for a Nun act 1 (1951)

  95 Copy quote

  Show source

• Moments fly, memories remain; and then memories fly, only memoirs remain and finally memoirs disappear, nothing remains!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Memories, Moments, Disappear

  3 Copy quote

• 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.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  45 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  5 Copy quote

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

  David Ben-Gurion

  Change, Believe, Writing

  8 Copy quote